Do we like Hong Joon-pyo?
Our score: 2 out of 10. His 2017 debate remarks blamed gay men for AIDS, he drew fire over comments on women, and the verified good on the record is thin.
Hong Joon-pyo is one of South Korea's most durable conservative brawlers: a five-term lawmaker, a former Daegu mayor, and the Liberty Korea Party's presidential candidate in 2017. He built a brand on blunt talk and picking fights, including with his own side. That is the bloke you are being asked to consider.
The legal chapter is the messiest. A Seoul court convicted him of bribery in September 2016 and sentenced him to 18 months over 100 million won allegedly taken from a late construction tycoon. The High Court overturned that in February 2017, and in December the Supreme Court upheld the acquittal for insufficient evidence. He called it “a great relief to be freed of the false charges” and accused prosecutors of fabricating evidence, which they would dispute.
The harm check is where he comes unstuck. In a 2017 presidential debate he blamed homosexuals for the “rampant spread of AIDS” in Korea and claimed gay soldiers weaken the military. A health official told the paper his AIDS claim was wrong, since surveys showed more infections among heterosexuals. In 2021 a Korea Times report listed him among People Power Party contenders who oppose the anti-discrimination law.
On women, the same 2017 campaign went badly. He said “Men have their own jobs and women have their own jobs” about washing dishes, and women's groups demanded he quit the race. They also seized on his 2005 autobiography, in which he recalled friends putting an animal stimulant in a female student's drink so a friend could assault her; women's groups called it attempted rape. He apologised at the debates, but only to voters, and the sexual violence relief centre said it found no sincerity.
Lately he has been a loud critic of his own camp. In January 2026 he wrote that the Democratic Party and the public, not Han Dong-hoon, stopped martial law, and called Han a “narcissist”. In April he said he had left the party after backing a Democratic candidate for Daegu mayor, brushing off traitor jibes with “I've been betrayed countless times.”
On the good side, he has broken with the martial law camp in public and kept doing it at cost to his standing with conservatives. Beyond that, we found no charity work or kind acts in the reporting we could open, so that is honestly the whole list.