It was not how Lee Jae-myung envisioned his first day on the job. Following his election as South Korea’s President on June 3, Lee’s staff arrived at their new offices in central Seoul the next morning to find rooms strewn with trash and desks equipped with monitors but bereft of computers, which had all been piled in a corner. It was a struggle to get doors unlocked and find even basic stationery. “It was a very busy and chaotic period,” Lee, 61, tells TIME in his only Western media interview