Ex-PM’s return tests Democratic Party of Korea unity

Onetime presidential hopeful Lee Nak-yon on Saturday announced his return to politics after being out of the public eye for about a year.

He was welcomed back by a handful of Democratic Party of Korea dissenters, whose support for Rep. Lee Jae-myung -- the main liberal opposition party’s leader mired in legal scandals -- has waned, signaling a possible split within the party.

“The world is worried about South Korea right now,” Lee Nak-yon told a crowd of supporters at Incheon Airport in a brief speech.

“South Koreans are worried about their country, when it should be the other way around,” he said, calling on the conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol to “correct” the way he is running the country. He said that under the leadership of the current president, South Korea’s democracy was retreating and the economy reeling.

He said Yoon needed to “set foreign relations right again," echoing the Democratic Party's criticism of the president’s closer alignment with Japan and the US. Japan “should halt the release of wastewater (stored at the now-defunct Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant) into the ocean and find a plan B,” he said.

He said he also has a responsibility to the state of things in the country and vowed not to leave the political stage.

“The South Korean people will set the country straight again,” he said. “I will be doing my part. In any and all circumstances, I will put our country first.”

For the past year, the Democratic Party bigwig kept a low-profile, residing in the US as a visiting scholar at George Washington University’s Institute for Korean Studies in Washington, D.C.

His return is anticipated to create tension with Lee Jae-myung’s leadership of the Democratic Party, as the latter was never a part of the party’s dominant pro-Moon Jae-in faction. Lee Nak-yon, on the other hand, was prime minister in the Moon administration.

The main opposition leader’s grip on the party was put to the test in February when he narrowly dodged the arrest warrant bill in an anonymous vote by the National Assembly, where nearly two-thirds of the seats are held by fellow Democratic Party lawmakers.

Insider critics of Lee Jae-myung say his regular -- almost weekly -- appearances in court as a defendant in criminal trials affect his ability to run the party as its leader at a critical time with the general election less than a year away.