Lee Jae-myung is a technocrat with hardscrabble origins.

South Korea’s main liberal candidate, Lee Jae-myung, began his presidential bid with a speech that spoke squarely to the nation’s simmering angst and its struggling center class.

“We’ve bought to usher in a world the place all can reside nicely collectively, maintain the weak, and curb the vainness of the sturdy, who typically resort to privilege and foul play,” Mr. Lee mentioned in a video deal with final summer time.

However the best problem for the labor-lawyer-turned-politician on this race, specialists say, is his have to signify the ruling Democratic Occasion whereas additionally distinguishing himself from President Moon Jae-in.

Although Mr. Moon has loved excessive approval scores in comparison with most South Korean presidents, the nation has continued to undergo from runaway housing costs and a youth unemployment disaster below his watch.

Born in 1964 within the small jap city of Andong, in North Gyeongsang Province, Mr. Lee turned often called the previous “manufacturing unit boy” and the son of a home cleaner who rose out of poverty to grow to be a profitable mayor and governor.

Certainly one of seven youngsters, he skipped center faculty to work at numerous factories within the northwestern metropolis of Seongnam, roughly 12.5 miles from Seoul. In accordance with Mr. Lee, a number of office accidents — together with one the place his arm was caught in a press machine — left him legally disabled by his late teenagers, when South Korea exempted him from its necessary army service.

Mr. Lee then earned a highschool equivalency diploma and received a scholarship to Seoul’s Chung-Ang College. After graduating, he returned to the city he labored in as a toddler to open his personal workplace as a labor lawyer.

On the stump, he has lengthy credited these experiences as his inspiration for coming into politics. He was elected Seongnam’s mayor in 2010, a publish he held for about eight years. Throughout that point, he created a citywide social welfare program, launched a modest common primary revenue program for younger adults, and supplied free entry to highschool uniforms and postnatal care.

Because the governor of Gyeonggi, South Korea’s most populous province, from 2018 to 2021, Mr. Lee impressed voters by swiftly addressing a sequence of points that turned sizzling political matters. Amongst them: He pushed for increasing using surveillance cameras in hospital working rooms after the invention that some docs had been assigning unlicensed employees to carry out surgical procedure. He additionally led profitable efforts to offer residents with stimulus cash throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

In contrast to his major rival, the firebrand former chief prosecutor Yoon Suk-yeol, Mr. Lee has spoken in favor of financial cooperation with North Korea. He’s the one candidate to have promised a common primary revenue plan that may finally distribute no less than 1 million received (about $814) to all residents per yr.

His plan would additionally scale as much as provide the next sum of two million received — no less than $1,629 per yr — to 19- to 29-year-olds yearly, a demographic that each candidates are vigorously competing for.