Turnout: 61.00%
About this election
South Korea held its 9th nationwide local elections on 3 June 2026, electing the heads and councils of all 17 first-level administrative divisions, the mayors and councils of more than 200 lower-tier municipalities, and the 17 metropolitan and provincial education superintendents — all on the same day. The result was a sweeping victory for the governing liberal Democratic Party (Deobureo Minju Party), which captured 12 of the 16 metropolitan-mayor and provincial-governor races and won clear majorities at every tier of local government. The conservative People Power Party (PPP) was reduced to four regional heads — Seoul, Daegu, North Gyeongsang and South Gyeongsang — confined largely to its traditional south-eastern (Yeongnam) heartland and the capital. Turnout reached 61.0%, the second-highest ever recorded for a South Korean local election and a sharp 10.1-percentage-point jump from the 50.9% of 2022.
The election was the first nationwide test of public opinion since the extraordinary events of 2024–2025. Conservative president Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law in December 2024, was impeached and removed from office, and lost the presidency to the Democratic Party's Lee Jae-myung in the snap presidential election of 3 June 2025 — exactly one year before this vote. Held twelve months into Lee's presidency, the 2026 local elections functioned as a referendum on his administration and on a conservative opposition still recovering from the martial-law crisis. Voters delivered a decisive endorsement of the governing party, extending Democratic control across most of the country.
South Korea's local elections elect, simultaneously, the executive heads of its regions and municipalities, the members of regional and municipal councils, and education superintendents. Regional and municipal heads are chosen by first-past-the-post; councils combine directly elected constituency seats with a smaller tier of proportional-representation seats allocated by party vote. The 17 first-level divisions comprise one special city (Seoul), six metropolitan cities, one special self-governing city (Sejong), and nine provinces (including the self-governing provinces of Jeju and Gangwon). The elections are administered by the independent National Election Commission (NEC).
The Democratic Party's gains were broad. Beyond its long-standing strongholds in the south-west and the capital region, it flipped Busan — where Chun Jae-soo unseated PPP incumbent Park Heong-joon by 50.53% to 47.91% — along with Incheon, Daejeon, Ulsan and Gangwon, where Woo Sang-ho narrowly defeated the conservative incumbent Kim Jin-tae. The party also held the populous Gyeonggi province, where Choo Mi-ae won 55.04%. The People Power Party retained only its Yeongnam fortresses — North Gyeongsang (Lee Cheol-woo, 67.24%) and South Gyeongsang (Park Wan-su, 51.29%, in a tight race against Kim Kyoung-soo) — and the conservative bastion of Daegu, plus the capital.
The marquee contest was the Seoul mayoralty, where PPP incumbent Oh Se-hoon held on by the narrowest margin of any major race, taking 49.22% to the Democratic challenger Chong Won-o's 48.07% — a gap of just over one percentage point. Oh's survival in the capital was one of the few bright spots for the conservatives on an otherwise bleak night, and it preserved the PPP's foothold in the country's most populous and politically symbolic city.
A structural novelty of the 2026 cycle was the integration of Gwangju Metropolitan City and South Jeolla Province into a single combined jurisdiction, which elected one regional head rather than two. In that contest the Democratic Party's Min Hyung-bae won an overwhelming 79.02%, reflecting the south-west's status as the party's heartland. On the map both Gwangju and South Jeolla are shown carrying this same combined result.
The Democratic landslide extended down the ballot. In the 933-seat regional councils the party won 589 seats to the PPP's 327, with the Progressive Party, the Rebuilding Korea Party and independents sharing the remainder. The party also took 119 of 227 municipal mayoralties (to the PPP's 95) and 1,574 of 3,034 municipal council seats (to the PPP's 1,277), giving it working control of local government across most of the country.
Turnout of 61.0% — with roughly 27.3 million ballots cast — was the second-highest for any local election in South Korean history, behind only the inaugural unified local elections of 1995. The surge of more than ten points over 2022 was widely attributed to the politically charged climate following the martial-law crisis and the 2025 change of government, which energised the electorate on both sides.
The 2026 local elections consolidated the Democratic Party's national dominance under President Lee Jae-myung, handing it control of executive and legislative power at almost every level of government. For the People Power Party, the result confirmed a retreat to its regional core and underscored the lasting electoral damage of the martial-law episode. The outcome reshaped the balance of power across South Korea's regions for the four-year local term.
Results are compiled from the National Election Commission of the Republic of Korea (NEC, nec.go.kr), the independent constitutional body that administers and certifies all South Korean elections. Vote shares are calculated as a share of valid votes.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.