DP chief Lee breaks hunger strike before arrest hearing

Democratic Party (DP) leader Lee Jae-myung ended his 24-day hunger strike on Saturday, ahead of his arrest warrant hearing scheduled for Tuesday, according to party officials.

Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung, right, talks to Jin Gyo-hoon, chief of the Gangseo District, from his hospital bed on Friday. [DEMOCRATIC PARTY]

Democratic Party (DP) leader Lee Jae-myung ended his 24-day hunger strike on Saturday, ahead of his arrest warrant hearing scheduled for Tuesday, according to party officials.

Lee decided to end his hunger strike, which he began on Aug. 31 to protest the Yoon Suk Yeol administration’s foreign and economic policies, following advice from doctors handling his case and urgings from his party’s leadership, according to DP spokesperson Kang Sun-woo.

The DP leader has been on an intravenous drip since being admitted to a hospital in Jungnang District, eastern Seoul, on Sept. 18, after he was found nearly unconscious in his office that same day.

The National Assembly on Thursday afternoon waived Lee’s immunity to arrest, the first time ever for the legislature to give its consent to the arrest of the leader of a major political party.

Judicial officials said Friday that Lee’s arrest warrant hearing will be held at 10 a.m. this coming Tuesday at the Seoul Central District Court and will be presided over by Judge Yoo Chang-hoon.

Kang said that Lee will attend his arrest warrant hearing.

Lee has been charged with a variety of corruption charges by prosecutors, including bribery and breach of trust.

If the hearing proceeds as scheduled, the court is expected to reach a decision on Lee’s arrest late Tuesday night or early Wednesday.

Despite Lee’s looming arrest warrant hearing, DP Rep. Jung Chung-rai said during the party’s Supreme Council meeting on Friday that Lee “will not step down,” vowing that the party would recoalesce in order to win the parliamentary elections, scheduled to take place in April.

During the meeting, other senior party officials, including floor leader Park Kwang-on and secretary-general Cho Jung-sik, offered to resign in the wake of the arrest motion’s passage.

In his meeting remarks, Jung also accused unnamed DP lawmakers of “selling out their own party leader,” highlighting the party’s inner turmoil and the possibility of recriminations.

While the 149-136 vote on the arrest motion against Lee on Thursday was conducted anonymously, the count showed that almost 30 of the party’s lawmakers unexpectedly broke ranks to vote in support of their leader’s arrest.

The DP holds a 167-seat majority in the 299-seat National Assembly, while its conservative rival, the People Power Party, only holds 111 seats.

In a post uploaded to Facebook on Thursday, DP Rep. Kim Byung-kee echoed similar sentiments to Jung’s remarks, calling party members who voted in favor of the motion “dogs.”

“I commend Democratic Party members who collaborated with prosecutors to overthrow Lee,” Kim wrote sarcastically.

The DP and its supporters have accused the state prosecution service of running a politically motivated investigation to bring down Lee, who ran in last year’s presidential election against the former prosecutor general and current president, Yoon Suk Yeol.

But others, such as Justice Minister Han Dong-hoon and the government-aligned PPP, have accused Lee of trying to hide behind his party’s supermajority in the National Assembly to avoid investigation for various corruption charges.

The gravest of the charges against Lee is that he violated international sanctions and committed bribery through a third party by asking underwear company Ssangbangwool to illegally transfer $8 million to North Korea, purportedly to arrange his visit to Pyongyang and to woo the North to engage in inter-Korean economic cooperation with Gyeonggi, where the DP leader served as governor from 2018 to 2021.

Lee also faces allegations that he committed breach of trust against public corporations by directing officials to rig the profit-sharing structures of development projects in Daejang-dong and Baekhyeon-dong in Seongnam, Gyeonggi, to favor certain private investors.

Lee served as mayor of Seongnam from 2010 to 2018.

If found guilty of all the charges, Lee could be sentenced to between 11 years and lifetime imprisonment, according to legal experts.

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]