Credit: Peaceful Unification Advisory Council.
On January 25, Lee Hae-chan 이해찬 passed away after suffering a heart attack in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where he was attending an event for the Vietnamese chapter of the Peaceful Unification Advisory Council 민주평화통일자문위원회. Lee collapsed and was hospitalized on January 23, and did not recover. Lee, whose political career took him from student activist to prime minister 국무총리, was one of the most important non-president politicians in modern South Korean history. (See previous coverage, “Lee Hae-chan Retires.”)
Born in 1952 in Cheongyang, Chungcheongnam-do Province 충청남도 청양, Lee enrolled in Seoul National University 국립서울대학교 in 1971 and joined the democracy movement against the Park Chung-hee 박정희 dictatorship. Lee’s protest tactics against Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan 전두환 regimes would become legendary. During the June Struggle 6월 항쟁 in 1987, Lee calculated Korea’s tear gas production capacity, then strategically staged protests in various parts of Seoul until the police ran out of tear gas, after which the Chun dictatorship began to negotiate a transition to democracy.
Lee entered electoral politics in 1988, recruited by Kim Dae-jung 김대중. He would go onto win seven National Assembly 국회 elections, and served as prime minister under President Roh Moo-hyun 노무현. Lee brought his experience as a tactician of protests to bear on electoral politics, and came to be known as one of the greatest liberal strategists. An early adopter of computer-based analysis of opinion polls, Lee is the only Korean Assembly Member never to lose an election as a seven-term legislator.
Lee also served as the chairman for Moon Jae-in 문재인’s 2017 presidential campaign and the Democratic Party 민주당’s 2020 General Election campaign, both of which ended in victories. Lee retired from politics in 2020, but came back to serve as a campaign chairman for the 2024 General Election, in which the Democrats again won a resounding victory.
