Cho Jeong-sik, the ruling Democratic Party’s (DP) longest-serving lawmaker and one of President Lee Jae Myung’s closest political allies, is set to be elected speaker of the National Assembly on June 5 for the remaining two years of the 22nd parliament’s term.

A six-term legislator who has won consecutive elections since entering the Assembly in 2004, Cho, 62, has built a reputation inside the DP as a pragmatic institutional operator with deep expertise in fiscal and legislative affairs.

But his insistence on a “one-team” relationship between the legislature and executive branch has also placed him at the center of a