South Korean President Lee Jae Myung’s Tumultuous Life Marked by Poverty and Peril

The Yomiuri Shimbun

5:00 JST, August 21, 2025

Born into a poor family and having worked as a laborer while young, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung is known for having overcome numerous adversities in his life. When he won the presidential election in June, South Korean media outlets all described him as having led a life of dramatic changes.

The have-not

A South Korean metaphor refers to a person born into a wealthy family as being a “gold spoon” and a person born into a poor family as being a “dirt spoon.”

In November 2021, Lee reflected on his childhood on social media, saying, “I wasn’t even born as a dirt spoon.” He also said, “I know how harsh the world is for the have-nots.”

Lee was the seventh of nine children in a farming family in Andong City in the eastern province of Gyeongsangbuk. His birth was not registered, so his exact date of birth is unknown. His official birthday, Dec. 22, 1964, was chosen by his mother based on advice from a fortune teller, although he was actually born in October 1963.

Due to his father’s gambling addiction, the family lost their farmland and moved to Seongnam City near Seoul after Lee graduated from elementary school. Lee did not attend middle school but worked in a factory making baseball gloves for over 12 hours a day. At age 12, he was injured in an accident when his left wrist was caught in a press machine, leaving him with a deformed arm.

Election law allegations

Lee passed the High School Equivalency Examination and enrolled in Chung-Ang University’s law school in Seoul in 1982. Determined to support the democracy movement as a lawyer, he opened a law office in Seongnam in his mid-20s. He was elected Seongnam mayor in 2010 and gained attention for populist policies such as providing payouts to young people.

His political life was on the brink during his tenure as Gyeonggi province governor from 2018.

Lee was convicted of violating the public official election law by allegedly making a false statement during a gubernatorial debate. Had the sentence been finalized, his election would have been invalidated, but the Supreme Court ultimately acquitted him and remanded the case to the high court, a decision described as a “miracle” by South Korean media.

At the time of the 2022 presidential election, Lee, a member of the left-leaning Democratic Party, ran a fierce campaign in the party’s primary against the mainstream faction led by then incumbent President Moon Jae-in, who was not a candidate. In the process, Lee was accused of wrongdoing related to a real estate development project.

Lee was ultimately named the party’s official candidate but could not dispel the image of fraud. This appeared to be a factor in his narrow loss to Yoon Suk Yeol in the presidential election — by just 0.73 percentage points.

Investigations into Lee progressed under the Yoon administration. Just before the 2025 presidential election, the Supreme Court overturned a high court ruling that had acquitted Lee of another election law violation. Lee would have been barred from running in the presidential election if he had received a penalty exceeding 1 million won. Lee has denied wrongdoing, calling it “political persecution” by conservatives.

Assassination attempt

Lee even survived a knife attack. In January 2024, ahead of the general election, he was stabbed in the neck by a man from the crowd during a visit to the southern city of Busan, leaving him hospitalized for eight days. According to police, the offender said he was trying to “prevent Lee from becoming president.”

Lee said after the incident, “They couldn’t kill me with a law or a pen, so they tried to kill me with a knife, but I will never die.”

According to Yonhap News, during the first U.S.-South Korean leaders’ phone conversation in June, Lee shared his experience of surviving an assassination attempt with U.S. President Donald Trump, who was also attacked during a presidential campaign rally last year.