Liberal candidate wins S. Korea presidency
SEOUL, South Korea - Hours after celebrating his election win with thousands of supporters in wet Seoul streets, new South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Wednesday was quickly thrown into the job of navigating a nation deeply split over its future and faced with growing threats from North Korea and an uneasy alliance with the United States.
Moon, whose victory capped one of the most turbulent political stretches in the nation’s recent history and set up its first liberal rule in a decade, began his duties as president after the National Election Commission officially declared him as winner after a morning meeting.
The election body had finished counting votes as of 6 a.m. and said Moon gathered 41% of the votes, comfortably edging conservative Hong Joon-pyo and centrist Ahn Cheol-soo, who gathered 24% and 21% of the votes, respectively.
“The National Election Commission, based on the first clause of Article 187 of the Public Official Election Law, determines that the Democratic Party’s Moon Jae-in, who gathered the largest number of valid votes, was elected as president,” NEC Chairman Kim Yong-deok said in the televised meeting.
Shortly after the NEC declared him as winner, Moon, as the new commander in chief of the country’s military, received a call from Army Gen. Lee Sun-jin, chairman of South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, who briefed him on the military’s preparedness against North Korea, a Democratic Party official said.
Moon also during the morning was expected to visit the National Cemetery in the central city of Daejeon, where the country’s independence fighters and war heroes are buried, before returning to capital Seoul around noon to take an oath of office at the National Assembly.
South Korea might see a sharp departure from recent policy under Moon, who favors closer ties with North Korea, saying hard-line conservative governments did nothing to prevent the North’s development of nuclear-armed missiles and only reduced South Korea’s voice in international efforts to counter North Korea.
This softer approach might put him at odds with South Korea’s biggest ally, the United States. The Trump administration has swung between threats and praise for North Korea’s leader.
Moon, the child of refugees who fled North Korea during the Korean War, will lead a nation shaken by a scandal that felled his conservative predecessor, Park Geun-hye, who sits in a jail cell awaiting a corruption trial later this month.
Moon’s presidency forgoes the usual two-month transition because Tuesday’s vote was a by-election to choose a successor to Park, whose term was to end in February 2018. While this means Moon would have to initially depend on Park’s Cabinet ministers and aides, the expectations were that he would move quickly to replace them with people of his own.
Moon will still serve out the typical single five-year term.
After exit polls indicated his victory Tuesday night, Moon smiled and waved his hands above his head as supporters chanted his name at Gwanghwamun square in central Seoul, where millions of Koreans had gathered for months starting late last year in peaceful protests that eventually toppled Park.
Moon was chief of staff for the last liberal president, the late Roh Moo-hyun, who sought closer ties with North Korea by setting up large-scale aid shipments to the North and by working on now-stalled joint economic projects.