Exit polls suggest big win for SKorea’s opposition parties
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s liberal opposition parties were expected to win a landslide victory in Wednesday’s parliamentary election, exit polls and ongoing vote counts suggested, a result that if confirmed would make conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol a lame duck for his remaining three years in office.
Joint exit polls by South Korea’s three major TV stations — KBS, MBC and SBS — showed the main opposition Democratic Party and its satellite party were forecast to win a combined 178 to 197 seats in the 300-member National Assembly. They expected another new liberal opposition party to win 12 to 14 seats.
The polls suggested the ruling People Power Party and its satellite party were projected to win 85 to 105 seats.
Wednesday’s election was widely seen as a midterm confidence vote on President Yoon, a former top prosecutor who took office in 2022 for a single five-year term.
He has pushed hard to boost cooperation with the U.S. and Japan as a way to address a mix of tough security and economic challenges. But Yoon has been grappling with low approval ratings at home and a liberal opposition-controlled parliament that has limited his major policy platforms.
Regardless of the results, Yoon will stay in power and his major foreign policies will likely be unchanged. But the ruling party’s big election defeat could set back Yoon’s domestic agenda and leave him facing an intensifying political offensive by his liberal opponents.
If the opposition parties garner a combined 200 seats — two-thirds of the 300 parliamentary seats at stake — they will have legislative powers to pass bills vetoed by a president and can even impeach him.
After gathering to watch TV broadcasts showing results of the exit polls, Democratic Party members cheered and clapped. “We’ll humbly watch the people’s choices to the end. Thanks much!” party leader Lee Jae-myung told reporters.
Of the 300 seats, 254 will be elected through direct votes in local districts, and the other 46 to the parties according to their proportion of the vote. The turnout for South Korea’s 44 million eligible voters was tentatively estimated at 67%, the highest for a parliamentary election since 1992, according to the National Election Commission.
With more than 50% of votes counted on average in the 254 constituencies late Wednesday, Democratic Party candidates were leading in about 153 to 156 districts, according to South Korean media tallies.
Of the votes cast for parties, less than 10% had been counted so no meaningful results were available yet.
Ahead of the election, the conservatives and their liberal rivals exchanged toxic rhetoric and mudslinging. Their mutual contempt deepened during the 2022 presidential election, during which Yoon and Lee, then the Democratic Party candidate, spent months demonizing each other. Yoon eventually beat Lee in the country’s most closely fought presidential contest.