Soon-Ok Shin is a visiting fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute (EUI) and lately an assistant professor in International Relations at the Universite de Tunis El Manar. Her research focuses on international relations in East Asia with specific reference to the US-ROK alliance, Sino-US relations, middle power studies, and DPRK nuclear discourse

A deepening gender divide amongst young people entered the mainstream political agenda in South Korea with mobilised anger erupting during the 2022 presidential campaign. The conservative People Power Party (PPP), tapping into younger males’ frustrations, embraced an anti-feminist agenda and pledged to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality, sending a message that the ruling Democratic Party’s gender-affirmative policy was ‘reverse’ discrimination against men. The PPP candidate’s subsequent paper-thin majority (0.73 %) suggested that gender politics may have been decisive. However, South Korea lags in global measures of gender equality, ranked towards the bottom regarding equal pay and political representation. Why, then, did gender politics emerge as a major issue in the presidential race? Does it reflect a growing tacit social consensus to reverse gender equality trends? Or was it merely an electoral ploy to mobilise younger males? In any case, this populist agenda, set around anger, resentment and hate speech, is no longer confined to a noisy social media sub-culture in South Korea but instead is increasingly mainstream. In this talk, a cooperation between the Comparative Politics Research Cluster and East Asia Study Group, Dr. Shin will examine the electoral outcome and gender divide in the broader context of this rising right-wing populism and how it played out in the election.