A new generation of left-wing politicians in the United States is having an unusually strong primary season ahead of the November midterm elections. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a marginal force on the national stage, has pushed a series of candidates through Democratic primaries. Following New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's victory, younger candidates have notched primary wins of their own: 29-year-old Melat Kiros defeated a 15-term incumbent in Colorado, and 32-year-old Darializa Avila Chevalier secured her spot on the ballot in New York.

Korean American candidate Francesca Hong narrowly lost the gubernatorial primary in Wisconsin. But Abdul El-Sayed's victory in the Michigan primary shows that the appeal of younger candidates among Democratic voters is not confined to deep-blue states. El-Sayed is neither a DSA member nor formally endorsed by the organization, but he did receive an endorsement from Bernie Sanders.

The rise should not be exaggerated, of course. New York has long been fertile terrain for Democrats, and the democratic socialist label still carries limited national appeal, according to Pew Research. A recent Brookings report noted that nearly three-quarters of 282 DSA-backed candidates ran for local or state legislative office rather than at the national level, and their successes were disproportionately concentrated in states and districts that were already liberal and Democratic.

For Korea, however, the lesson is organizational rather than ideological. Mamdani did not win the mayoral election simply because he was young or ran a smart social media campaign. He emerged from an ecosystem in which the DSA, labor organizers, volunteers and prominent political figures such as Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were all connected by recognizable issues like housing and economic inequality. The candidate's individual talent was matched with an organization capable of converting public discontent into votes.

Korea has no comparable pipeline. The June 3 local elections looked encouraging at first glance, with 403 candidates under the age of 40 elected out of 810 who ran. Yet young politicians remain scarce: not a single candidate won a metropolitan, municipal or provincial executive position. The recent Democratic Party of Korea convention made the problem plainly visible. Young candidates, including Kim Bo-mi, who ran for party leadership, and Supreme Council candidates Kim Hyung-nam and Jeong Min-cheol, were all eliminated in the preliminary round. A proposal to create a designated Supreme Council seat for youth also fell through.

The peculiar case of the Reform Party candidate in the Busan mayoral election offers a different kind of warning. His campaign initially seemed to embody generational renewal in Korea's oldest major metropolitan city, but it ended with just 1.56 percent of the vote. He now faces allegations that an attack on himself during the election was self-staged — a reminder that youth alone is not a qualification.

The struggles of young Koreans have a structural dimension. First, turnout among voters in their 20s and 30s has been lower than that of older groups, weakening their leverage inside parties and giving politicians little incentive to tailor policies to younger people. The younger generation is itself split, particularly between young men and women, eroding the notion of a "unified youth" as parties compete along that divide. This imbalance carries long-term weight in a country that Statistics Korea records as having the world's lowest fertility rate and one of its fastest-aging populations, meaning today's younger cohorts will bear a growing share of the costs of decisions made largely without them.

Young politicians also lack durable issue-based organizations that can regularly recruit potential candidates, train campaigners, mobilize voters between elections and support their political activities afterward. Election law, which restricts candidates from using paid online election advertisements and limits political ads on platforms that can reach millions of viewers, further constrains the kind of outreach campaigns that young American politicians have used. Taken together, youth politics in Korea often amounts to a party selecting a promising individual, giving them a special title and expecting personal appeal to do the rest.

This matters because making politics look younger is not the same as representing the young — different generations experience the same country differently.

Housing and pension reforms are domestic examples. Younger Koreans entered adulthood after housing prices had already skyrocketed, and they are being asked to finance a pension system whose long-term sustainability they question. On foreign policy, division may be part of a living memory of family history for older generations. Yet annual unification perception surveys from both the Korea Institute of National Unification and the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University show a sharp generational divide, with respondents in their 20s and 30s less likely to see unification as necessary. Policies built on old assumptions risk losing legitimacy when the generation expected to inherit them is absent from the discussion.

There are promising experiments, including the government's use of the Youth Talent database to connect young people with policy advisory roles, and a new youth fellowship launched by the presidential office to provide internship opportunities. These programs can serve as entry points for many. Still, internships and advisory panels are no substitute for political power. Parties must create pathways from local politics to nominations, leadership posts and winnable seats, and the establishment must be willing to welcome young people into politics even when it occasionally costs them their own seats. To nurture a genuine pool of next-generation candidates, such an effort should draw in people involved in issue-based organizations rather than personalities popular enough to survive only a single election.

Korea does not need its own Mamdani in the literal sense. As I argued in a similar vein two years ago in this newspaper, it needs instead the conditions that made his rise possible — ideas that organize people and institutional bases that sustain them, along with a political system willing to let a new generation compete for real power to change society.

Park Jin-wan is a nonresident fellow at the European Centre for North Korean Studies at the University of Vienna and co-founder of the U.S.-ROK-Japan Trilateral Next-Gen Study Group.