Lee Jae-myung, the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, has had dramatic moments in the past few days. On May 1, the Supreme Court overturned the Appellate Court’s decision to acquit Lee on charges of violating the Election Probation Act. If Lee were to be found guilty and fined more than 1 million won ($713.2) before election day on June 3, he would have been legally barred from running for office. (The original conviction, in November 2024, gave Lee a one-year suspended prison sentence.) That would have effectively sidelined the heavy favorite in the race to decide the successor of Yoon Suk-yeol, who was impeached last month for his illegitimate declaration of martial law in December 2024.
However, Lee is now free from the unprecedented risk of being barred from running in the presidential election at the last minute.
The Seoul High Court on Wednesday announced its decision to postpone Lee’s trial to June 18. The main goals of the decision are twofold: to provide Lee an “equal” opportunity to campaign and to clear the public’s questions over the court’s political motives. To many South Koreans, the Supreme Court’s ruling was tantamount to the judiciary branch trying to intervene in the presidential election.
The Democratic Party welcomed the Seoul High Court’s decision. The party and Lee supporters have expressed serious worry over the possibility that the Supreme Court is trying to affect the presidential election, considering the court’s unprecedentedly swift process to rule in such an important case. The Supreme Court’s ruling was made only nine days after Chief Justice Cho Hee-dae referred Lee’s case to en banc, meaning all the justices would hear the case. Given the speedy timeframe, many assumed that Cho and other justices would simply confirm the Appellate Court’s acquittal ruling on Lee, since they did not even have enough time to review more than 60,000 pages of records from Lee’s trials.
When the Supreme Court unexpectedly overturned Lee’s acquittal, the Democratic Party strongly accused Cho of intervening in the presidential election in order to help boost the prospects of Lee’s rivals – either Kim Moon-soo, the presidential candidate for Yoon’s conservative People Power Party (PPP), or Han Duck-soo, former acting president who announced his bid to run for the campaign a day after the Supreme Court’s ruling on Lee.
Adding to the political flavor of the case, all 10 of the justices, including Cho, who overturned Lee’s acquittal were appointed by Yoon. The two justices who opposed the court’s decision had been appointed by Yoon’s predecessor, Moon Jae-in of the DP. In this context, there were criticisms aimed at the Supreme Court, especially Cho, that it should have taken more time to reach a verdict unanimously, as Constitutional Court did in Yoon’s impeachment case. (The Constitutional Court took a relatively long time on its ruling on Yoon’s impeachment compared to the two previous impeachment cases against presidents in 2004 and 2017, respectively.)
For Lee and South Korea’s liberal camp, the nightmare scenario would have been a conviction and sentencing that barred Lee from running for office after May 11, the deadline to register candidates for the presidential election. That would have tied the Democratic Party’s hands completely, as the party would not be able to field an alternative candidate.
With the Seoul High Court’s decision to postpone Lee’s trial, however, all scenarios pulling Lee out of the presidential race are off the table. South Korean law prohibits legal cases against a sitting president, with the exception of charges of treason or insurrection. As Lee will likely win a landslide victory in the upcoming presidential election, the Democratic Party is completing steps in the National Assembly, where it holds a massive majority, to revise or enact a bill specifying a halt to all ongoing trials against the president during his term.