The People Power Party's Central Ethics Committee has effectively become a power center that determines the fate of party leaders and shapes factional rivalries, observers inside and outside the party say. Its rulings now influence not only the contest for party leadership but also the political standing of prospective presidential candidates.
Under party leader Jang Dong-hyeok, the ethics committee remains at the heart of internal conflict. Following the local elections, Jang has been pushing expulsion proceedings against lawmakers aligned with former party leader Han Dong-hoon — including Cho Gyeong-tae and Jin Jong-oh — under the banner of restoring party discipline. The moves come after the committee voted in January to expel Han, and critics say the pattern of using the ethics panel to purge opponents has continued unabated since.
The committee first came to be seen as a political power in 2022, when it disciplined then-PPP leader Lee Jun-seok, now head of the Reform Party. At a time when reports of friction between Lee and then-President Yoon Suk Yeol were circulating, allegations of sexual favors involving Lee suddenly surfaced. The committee voted to suspend his party membership for six months — the first time in history that the party's ethics body had imposed a disciplinary measure on a sitting party leader.
Lee's loss of the leadership post triggered a transition to an emergency steering committee. Police ultimately cleared him of the allegations, but the party's leadership structure had already changed by then.
Lee's case set a precedent, and a four-year streak of harsh ethics rulings followed. Referrals to the committee had once attracted little attention, but after Lee's case, even the initiation of disciplinary proceedings became a major political event capable of reshaping the leadership landscape and inflaming factional tensions. Inside the party, some have gone so far as to say that an ethics ruling is tantamount to a verdict on a politician's career.
The committee's outsized influence stems from how it is constituted. Under the PPP's party charter, the party leader appoints the ethics committee chair and its members after a vote by the supreme council. The Democratic Party of Korea, by contrast, appoints the head of its ethics tribunal through ratification by the party affairs committee — a structure that gives the party leader comparatively less direct sway. The PPP arrangement, analysts say, gives the party leader far greater leverage over the ethics body.
The difficulty of overturning a ruling once handed down has further amplified the committee's power. Lee sought a court injunction to suspend the effect of his disciplinary measure, but the court rejected the request. Observers at the time attributed the outcome to the judiciary's general reluctance to intervene in internal party matters. A similar injunction request filed by lawmaker Bae Hyun-jin was granted, however, offering a rare counterexample.
Critics now argue that the increasingly powerful ethics committee has lost its original function and operates more like a political instrument that stokes conflict rather than resolves it.
"A pattern has solidified in which the ethics committee ends up delivering the verdict whenever a clash erupts between the current power and the next," one political insider said. "Politics should be resolved through politics, and it is not healthy for the committee's judgment to repeatedly serve as the mechanism for settling factional disputes."
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