Do we like Lee Jun-seok?
Our score: 3 out of 10. A long record of stoking gender conflict and a debate remark that drew a 510,000-signature petition, with little verified good to set against it.
Lee is a Seoul-born Harvard graduate who started an education-tech startup, was picked by Park Geun-hye for a party committee at 26, and became the first person in his 30s to lead a major conservative party. He lost his home-district races in 2016 and 2020 before the People Power Party made him leader at 36 in 2021. He left in late 2023, founded the Reform Party and won a Hwaseong seat in 2024.
The thing he's best known for is courting young men by running against feminism. In 2021 he said any 20-something man would tell you the anger comes from feminism, and he called for scrapping the gender equality ministry. He says he was aiming at “radical feminists”, not ordinary women, but critics say he handed a mainstream platform to online groups hostile to feminism.
In 2019 he said a radical feminist group's actions were “no different from terrorism”, which is a big call about a group of activists. Korea's human rights commission classified his remarks about discrimination against women being a 'groundless victim mentality' as hate speech in 2022. That's the harm test in a nutshell: it's his own words, over years, aimed at women.
The low point came in the final 2025 presidential debate, when he repeated a vulgar phrase about the female body to attack the Democratic Party candidate. Protesters held signs about a politics of hate, and a petition to expel him passed 510,000 signatures. He didn't offer a full apology, only that he wouldn't bring it up if he could go back. Police later cleared him over complaints about the remark, saying there was insufficient evidence he knew it was false.
On LGBTQ+ issues the record is thin. As People Power Party leader in 2021 he said the Anti-Discrimination Act was “premature” and there was “no need to rush”, although he agreed in principle that discrimination should be addressed broadly. That's not hostility, but it's not support either, and we found nothing since.
On the nice test he's a mixed bag. A 2021 online allegation that he took sexual favours from a businessman in 2013 ended in 2024 when prosecutors dismissed the related false-accusation charge for insufficient evidence, and he has denied it. When his Busan candidate was accused of faking an attack, he apologised and promised to hold the candidate accountable, then resigned as leader. Against that, a lot of what he's built has relied on stoking a gender divide.