Why young women, once Lee's strongest base, are turning away

President Lee Jae Myung speaks during a senior presidential secretaries' meeting at Cheong Wa Dae in Seoul, Thursday. Joint Press Corps

Lee, a 32-year-old office worker in Seoul, spent years working and saving toward a single goal: buying her own apartment with a mortgage. She had just reached that point when the government cut the loan cap in half, from 600 million to 300 million won. "I've been working hard and saving up money and now that I was finally about to buy my own home with a mortgage, getting the loan cap cut in half is a huge blow to me," she said.

She had voted for President Lee Jae Myung, drawn by his hands-on administrative background as mayor of Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province and later Gyeonggi Governor.

"I had high hopes for President Lee Jae Myung because he became president with hands-on administrative experience, unlike past leaders with a judiciary or legislative background," she said. "Watching the news about how he sold his own apartment in Seongnam makes it feel like double standards."

She no longer supports him.

Her story is not an outlier. Many young women in their 20s and 30s — a demographic that played a pivotal role in electing Lee — are withdrawing their support for him and the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), driven by disappointment over housing policy, prosecution reform, an absence of policies addressing women's issues and infighting within the party.

Sense of betrayal

For voters like the 32-year-old office worker, the mortgage cap cut landed as a personal betrayal from a president many had trusted precisely because of his practical, ground-level experience.

The sense of double standards has been sharpened by scrutiny of the sale of Lee's own Seongnam apartment, which was structured through a seller-financing arrangement — ownership was transferred to the buyer before the final payment was made in full, with a 1.77 billion won mortgage registered in the buyer's name to cover the outstanding balance.

Critics have questioned why the president, who has pushed to tighten mortgage access for ordinary buyers, used a financing structure of his own to complete his sale, and that sentiment recurs as a common thread among former supporters citing real estate policy as their breaking point.

Other former supporters point to the administration's push to strip prosecutors of supplementary investigative powers as evidence that Lee is reforming the justice system to serve himself.

"Public trust in the police is dropping, yet he's removing prosecutors from power just to evade his own legal punishment," said a 38-year-old office worker, a former dues-paying DPK member.

She cited the Busan roundhouse kick case, in which a supplementary prosecutorial investigation helped secure a 20-year sentence for attempted rape-murder, as proof of what could be lost.

"I feel so sorry for the potential victims who would not get a chance to get justice through supplementary prosecutorial investigation ... If things keep going like this, private vigilante justice is only going to surge," she said.

A 38-year-old office worker surnamed Yu raised a similar recent incident: the Gwangju schoolgirl murder case, the suspect of which is the son of an active-duty police officer, who allegedly attempted to cover up the crime.

"The DPK just got rid of [prosecutors' supplementary investigative authority] as if it doesn't care about the victim, by using its majority power at the Assembly," she said, adding that the party she once considered a champion of decency "is long gone."

Several former supporters also said the administration has largely avoided addressing gender-based violence and discrimination, a gap they attribute to political calculation.

"There is a complete absence of policies on women's issues. Women's issues were never brought to the forefront of their governance philosophy out of fear of losing young male voters in their 20s and 30s," said a 31-year-old office worker surnamed Lee.

"Beyond structural gender discrimination, violent crimes targeting women continue to occur, yet there is no visible determination to strengthen victim protection or crack down harder on offenders."

Warning sign

According to polls from Gallup Korea, the president's approval rating in July 2025 stood at 61 percent among women in their 20s and 69 percent among women in their 30s. However, by July 2026, those figures had fallen to 45 percent and 47 percent, respectively — a decline noticeably steeper than the drop in Lee's overall approval rating, which fell from 64 to 53 percent over the same period.

The support rate for the DPK faces a similar trend. While the party's overall approval rating stayed above 40 percent throughout the year, registering 42 percent last month — down 3 percentage points from July 2025 — support fell more sharply among women, dropping from 37 to 29 percent among those in their 20s and from 48 to 39 percent among those in 30s.

The survey was conducted weekly among approximately 1,000 voters aged 18 and older nationwide, with results aggregated monthly. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level.

Political commentator Lee Jong-hoon said the withdrawal of support from young women, once a key support base for Lee, reflects long-simmering frustration that has intensified since the local elections.

"Since the Lee administration came to power — and particularly after the June 3 local elections — they've started pulling back or withholding their support ... Lately, it's been the internal party feuding — the rising conflict between the so-called pro-Lee faction and opposing factions,” the commentator explained.

“There is growing disappointment over the Lee administration driving through hardline policies without compromise; the Criminal Procedure Act amendment or real estate policy. I consider them the absolute core of the 'New Lee Jae Myung' supporter, so losing the primary base is a serious warning sign for the DPK.”