The Tamesis
February 26, 2026
Seoul – Ongoing controversy within the main opposition People’s Power Party over its relationship with former President Yoon Seok-yeol highlights the tension between loyalty to the former leader and the need for renewal that often plagues South Korea’s political parties.
Charges of “betrayal” have become a recurring feature as parties struggle to readjust after forming alliances with powerful figures.
The Conservative Party remains locked in an internal fight: party leaders seek to maintain ties with the ousted leader, while other MPs call for a clean break.
Calls for the party to distance itself from Yoon have grown louder as criminal convictions mount against the former president, including last week for leading an insurrection. Many lawmakers warned that continued ties to the former president could undermine efforts to rebuild support ahead of local elections on June 3.
The party’s support has continued to decline since its defeat in the 2025 presidential election.
But party chairman Jang Dong-hyuk has refused to formally break with Yoon Eun-hye, fearing alienating the party’s core conservative base.
The dispute escalated on Friday after Jang criticized a court ruling that Yoon was sentenced to life in prison for rebellion.
A new round of infighting complicates wider efforts to reorganize the party.
Since Yin’s ouster, the People’s Power Party has been trying to reverse a sharp decline in support while preparing for local elections, which are widely seen as a test of the viability of the conservative bloc after Yin’s resignation.
Discussions of a rebranding of the party, including a possible name change to reflect a refresh, were mooted earlier this year, but have largely stalled as internal debate repeatedly returns to how the party should define its relationship with the former president.
Political commentator Jang Sung-chul said the deadlock reflected structural features of South Korean voter behavior.
“Compared with voters in many other democracies, South Korean voters tend to show stronger personal loyalty to political leaders and are highly sensitive to narratives of betrayal,” Chang said. “Even when party leadership attempts to distance themselves, core supporters tend to rally more strongly around the former leader.”
Rep. Jang’s political career benefited from strong support from hardliners backed by Yoon, and his continued reliance on that political base limited his ability to break with the former president, he added.
Choi Chang-yeol, a political science professor at Yongin University, said this situation reflects the deeper institutional characteristics of South Korea’s party system.
“Parties here often reorganize around individual leaders rather than long-term policy platforms,” Choi said. “Under strong single-term presidential systems, former presidents continue to serve as political symbols even after leaving office, making a clean separation structurally difficult.”
This pattern has appeared before.
After President Park Geun-hye was impeached in 2017, conservative leaders tried to reshape their image by distancing themselves from Park Geun-hye, but loyal supporters instead rallied around the former president, resulting in long-lasting factional conflicts and a slow recovery in conservative politics.
“If a political party still maintains ties to the former president, it will be difficult for it to expand to moderate voters,” Choi said. “But severing ties too abruptly could face backlash from core supporters and could trigger internal divisions.”
Leadership succession issues further exacerbate this cycle, Choi added, noting that during a presidential term, strong presidential authority often overshadows potential successors.
“Parties often face a leadership vacuum when a president leaves office,” he said. “This vacuum allows the former leader’s political influence to persist long after his formal power ends.”
Meanwhile, similar tensions are emerging within the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, suggesting that the phenomenon is not limited to former presidents but reflects broader patterns of presidential party politics.
Democratic leader Rep. Chung Chung-rae, who has long been associated with supporters of the party’s Moon Jae-in, was recently expelled from the main online community of supporters of President Lee Jae-myung after repeated clashes with supporters of Lee Jae-myung, who accused him of undermining Democratic unity.
While Lee Myung-bak remains the current president, critics say the incident shows that an organized base of supporters aligned with presidential figures can exert pressure even on senior party leaders, blurring the lines between the party’s formal authority and grassroots mobilization.
A former lawmaker who served from 2020 to 2024, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the two main parties remain locked in repeated cycles of factional rivalry shaped by the president’s legacy rather than his policy agenda.
“South Korean politics still tends to revolve around presidential figures and loyalist struggles within factions, rather than policy competition,” the former lawmaker said. “Unless the parties transcend this structure, similar conflicts will continue no matter which party is in power.”
