Do we like Woo Won-shik?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A long record of standing up for democracy and workers, marked down for one contested science fight and because we found nothing on LGBTQ+ rights either way.
Woo's story starts as a student. In 1980 he protested a military dictatorship and was imprisoned for three years, according to Al Jazeera. Decades later he was a five-term Democratic Party MP, and in June 2024 he was voted Speaker with 189 votes while the People Power Party (PPP) sat out the ballot.
His moment came on 3 December 2024, when President Yoon declared martial law. Woo climbed the Assembly fence after police blocked the entrance, then refused to skip steps even as special forces advanced. The vote to lift martial law passed with 190 of the 300 lawmakers, and analysts credited his insistence on procedure for the peaceful outcome. Young Koreans nicknamed him “National Assembly Thor”.
His stoush with the opposition is a neutrality fight. On 9 December 2025 he cut the microphone on PPP MP Na Kyung-won's filibuster and adjourned the session, the first time since 2012 a Speaker had done that without a deal between the parties. The PPP lodged a resolution calling for his resignation and accused him of ignoring neutrality and colluding with the Democratic Party. Woo rejected the claim. Where you land depends on whether you see a Speaker enforcing the rules or one taking a side.
On the harm test we found nothing nasty in his words or acts about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and no dodgy company. The gap is that we found no statement from him on the anti-discrimination law, so we can't say where he stands. His main contested position is Fukushima: in 2023 he held a two-week hunger strike against Japan's wastewater release and asked the IAEA chief to reverse its finding that the plan was safe. Rivals call him a “Japan hawk”, and the science on that is contested.
At his farewell press conference on 28 May 2026 he named defending democracy after martial law as the greatest achievement of his term. He also listed the Yellow Envelope Act, the revised Commercial Act and a semiconductor law. His big regret was the collapse of the constitutional amendment effort, the first in 39 years. He said he would keep working for “the socially vulnerable”, and President Lee Jae-myung publicly thanked him for upholding dialogue and compromise.
In June he told his own party that he had never heard the kind of mocking, contemptuous language now flying around its leadership race, and said the party couldn't call the local election results a victory. Lone-wolf honesty like that is a good sign in a politician. We found no reporting on him from the months since.