Lee Jae-myung

south korea has a new president, and he's already picking a fight with the housing market — which, in seoul, is basically picking a fight with everyone.

lee jae-myung didn't arrive at the blue house on a smooth arc. he was born in andong into real poverty, skipped middle school to work in a factory in seongnam, lost the use of his arm in an industrial accident there, and then spent years clawing toward a law degree and a political career that kept stalling. he lost elections. he lost a presidential primary to moon jae-in in 2017. he ran for president in 2022 and lost by less than a percentage point — the narrowest margin in south korean history — to yoon suk yeol. for most people, that's where the story ends.

but then came december 2024. president yoon declared martial law in what looked, to most observers, like a desperate improvisation. lee jae-myung drove to the national assembly, climbed a fence to get inside, and livestreamed it. the moment had a kind of unscripted force to it — a politician literally scaling a wall to get to work. he helped lead the impeachment that followed. the constitutional court removed yoon. and in the snap election that came after, lee finally won.

so now he's president, and the question everyone's watching is whether the convictions he built his career on actually survive contact with power. the clearest test right now is housing. seoul's property market is one of the most distorted in the developed world — jeonse, the deposit-based rental system, has been a vehicle for speculation for decades, and ownership is concentrated enough that it functions almost as a wealth transmission mechanism for a particular generation. lee's response is a differentiated property tax — higher rates on people holding multiple properties, with the logic that you tax your way toward redistribution and use the revenue to accelerate public housing supply. he's also moved to tighten jeonse loans, trying to close off one of the channels that's been feeding price inflation.

the conservative press, joseon ilbo especially, has been running the skeptic case hard: supply is what's broken, and taxing your way out of a housing crisis has a mixed record. there's a version of that critique that's serious. there's also a version that's defending the status quo. lee is betting it's mostly the latter, and that enough voters who've been priced out of ownership know it. the internal friction is real too — ryu si-min, a prominent voice in the broader democratic camp, has been publicly pushing back on lee's direction, a sign that the coalition isn't as settled as the election result made it look.

still, what's striking about this moment is the coherence of the wager. lee has been saying roughly the same things about inequality and housing since his time as mayor of seongnam. he governed gyeonggi province with a version of this politics. the presidency is the largest stage he's ever had, and he's using it to run the same argument at national scale — that the property wealth gap is a structural problem that requires structural intervention, not patience.

whether it works is genuinely uncertain. but the bet is legible, and the man making it has been losing and climbing fences and coming back for a long time.