Yu Si-min's 'monarchy and aristocracy' remarks on Lee send shockwaves through ruling party

Remarks by prominent liberal commentator Yu Si-min — in which he said President Lee Jae Myung's effort to handpick and install his own ruling party leader amounted to moving toward "monarchy and aristocracy" — are reverberating through the Democratic Party of Korea, sparking an immediate backlash from within its own ranks.

Lawmakers aligned with Lee pushed back at once, while even those in the camp loyal to Jung Chung-rae drew a line, saying they did not fully agree with Yu's remarks.

Yu appeared on the YouTube channel "Jang In-su's Journalist" on Monday and, when asked to give an overall assessment of the Democratic Party's Aug. 17 national convention, said the event had confirmed that "the party lost half its members." "This is extremely damaging to the president, and I cannot understand why he would bring this upon himself," he said.

Yu said Kim Min-seok, who won the party leadership race, "ran as the president's proxy" and that "the president trying to dominate the party by sending his own representative goes against the spirit of a republic." He added that he had thought Jung Chung-rae would have difficulty winning the leadership, and that he had considered anything above 40 percent a success for Jung. "The fact that the non-mainstream faction survived at a level far higher than I expected shows that Democratic Party members are truly admirable," he said.

Yu said President Lee had shown "the face of an arrogant power holder" over the past year and was not governing "through communication, empathy and connection." He went on to say that the conduct of Lee and the Democratic Party over the year since taking office resembled the internal conflicts within the People Power Party during the Yoon Suk Yeol administration.

"Watching the process of ousting then-party leader Lee Jun-seok, I said a tragic outcome was coming because he was dismantling his own power base," Yu said. "This administration is also heading into a very unstable phase as the anti-Lee faction is being dismantled."

Park Hong-keun, minister of the Ministry of Planning and Budget, responded swiftly on Facebook, saying Yu had "poured out sharp daggers against President Lee like a waterfall over more than two hours on YouTube." "The most jarring moment was when he compared President Lee to insurrection ringleader Yoon Suk Yeol," Park said, strongly rebuffing the remarks.

Park called Yu's comments "absurd speculation, a curse, and deeply insulting criticism," and questioned whether Yu, having overestimated his own contribution to the birth of the Lee Jae Myung government, was now harboring resentment because things had not gone his way. "We cannot deny the role Yu played in bringing this government into being," Park said. "But has he not let that sense of contribution inflate to the point where he now bears a grudge against the current situation?"

Park added that Lee's governing style may not align with Yu's personal philosophy, and that whatever personal ties the two once shared may have frayed for some reason. "Even so, he must not hurl indiscriminate curses like this," Park said. "This is a well that Yu helped dig himself — is it right to spit into it just because he does not like how it looks?"

Han Min-su, a supreme council member aligned with the Jung Chung-rae camp, appeared on SBS's "Kim Tae-hyun's Politics Show" on Tuesday and said he had not watched the full video, but drew a line nonetheless. "He spoke as a commentator sharing his own views, and he has his own judgment on that — but I do not fully agree with everything he said," Han said.