As such, they will take a leading role in developing and communicating party platforms to the electorate.
In many representative democracies, party leaders compete directly for high political office.
Thus, in the politics of several countries utilizing the parliamentary system, a political party's leader is treated as a de facto candidate for prime minister by the media and the general public, even if said office is technically not directly elected.
This is much harder to do in presidential and semi-presidential systems, where the chief executive is a president who can only be removed by a special impeachment (typically involving a legislative supermajority, an investigation by a constitutional court, or both), and removal entails either a snap election or automatic succession to office by a vice president; therefore, the party's de jure internal leader either takes a background role (such as the Chairs of the Democratic, and Republican parties in the United States, who serve more so as the chief administrative officers of their respective political parties), or the leadership may be automatically bestowed on an incumbent president who belongs to the party (such as the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan).
Consequently, it does occasionally happen that the leaders of a German party are not even members of parliament, such as Saskia Esken and Lars Klingbeil, who are incumbent the chairpersons of the (governing) Social Democrats.
This sometimes leads to open conflicts between the party leadership, its parliamentary group and its members of government.
At election time the leader is always the Lijsttrekker (top candidate) of the party list.
The representative of the Democratic Party of Korea is Song Young-gil, who was elected in May 2021, and the representative of the conservative opposition PPP is Lee Jun-seok, a famous young politician who was elected in June 2021.
The current chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party is President Lai Ching-te.
If only one candidate emerges, they are said to be "elected by acclamation" or "ratified" by the general membership (sometimes the term "anointed" occurs informally or in media discourse).
However, major parties also generally have a National Committee as their governing body, which has separate leadership roles.