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In the end, the strangest thing happened.
On 9 March 2022, South Korea's latest presidential election took place.
An election that broke a historical tradition in the young South Korean democracy:
The alternation of government between conservatives and progressives every 10 years.
This time, VisualPolitik fans, things were different.
We have already covered this in the Weekly Snapshot, the newsletter that all of you who
are part of the VisualPolitik community on Patreon receive.
South Korea has just undergone a political upheaval.
After only five years, the conservatives are back in power.
And they are not doing it with just any candidate.
Did you see this video?
It has been in response to Yoon Seok-yeol's victory.
Listen up!
If Yoon had been told just 12 months ago that he would become president a year later, he
would have laughed for sure.
The South Korean president-elect is a political outsider.
Until March 2021, he was the Attorney General of the country, appointed, as it happens,
by the outgoing president, Moon Jae-in, himself.
Quite a plot twist.
As Attorney General, Yoon Seok-yeol, was known to be ruthless against corruption.
In fact, he was the architect of the imprisonment of two former South Korean presidents, the
conservatives Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, who were accused of corrupt practices such
as bribery and influence peddling.
However, as we shall see, that was not what won him the election.
His victory, by the way, was achieved by a very narrow margin: 48.56% of the votes against
47.83% of his progressive opponent.
Less than one point of difference, fewer than 250,000 votes.
Now, what could explain the disruption of the historic 10-year alternation of government?
Why has Moon Jae-in become the first president whose party has lost the confidence of South
Korean citizens after the first term?
What future lies ahead for the Korean Peninsula?
Well, let's take a look.
Moon Jae-in ran for election in 2017 with a series of perhaps too verbose and risky
promises for a five-year term.
Remember that there is no presidential re-election in South Korea.
You see, Moon promised to carry out a complete social, economic and political overhaul that,
among other things, included ending once and for all the close connections between politics
and the chaebol – South Korea's big business conglomerates.
He also promised to move the president's office out of Seoul, to end civilian nuclear power
and, the two most important issues, solve the serious problem of housing prices in Seoul
and its wider metropolitan area and to achieve peace with North Korea once and for all.
Well, five years on, none of these major objectives have been fully achieved.
We could even say that, considering his own expectations, his government has been a failure.
He did not even manage to fulfill a minor promise such as moving the president's office
out of Seoul.
Something that, by the way, his own party is now criticizing the new president for.
That’s politics for you.
Of course, this is the funniest part of the story.
The following…
not that much.
There’s the case of energy policy, which is much more far-reaching – in 2017 as soon
as Moon Jae-in came to power he announced a plan to phase out nuclear power in the country.
//Deep sigh// How badly some newspaper archives age....
Because, of course, with the skyrocketing prices of natural gas and oil and with coal
prices also skyrocketing, things changed radically.
Moon's own government suddenly seemed to be championing the pro-nuclear campaign.
Yes, rectifying is wise...
But, I don't know, in only five years and after having been so categorical?
Let them at least admit that they were wrong.
But wait, because we have only just begun.
For example, it is true that his policy toward North Korea has brought the greatest period
of military stability on the Korean peninsula since the Sunshine Policy of the late 1990s,
but in the end, except for his three summits with Kim Jong-un and the two with Trump, in
which he acted as mediator, the results have not gone much further.
You have seen the video, right?
Well...
That's it.
During Moon Jae-in's presidency, North Korea continued its campaign of constant provocations.
For example, Pyongyang launched dozens of missiles of various ranges, continued to insult
the authorities of its southern neighbour in its state media and just a few months after
Moon came to power, they tested a hydrogen atomic bomb.
The latter, however, nuclear testing, has been stopped dead in its tracks.
The Korean peninsula has not seen a single nuclear detonation for four and a half years.
Of course, it could also be that this phase of the North's nuclear program has already
been completed.
The peak of activity came in June 2020, when North Korea literally blew up the Kaeseong
[pron: Ka-song] Inter-Korean Liaison Office, a symbol of dialogue between the two Koreas.
Since then, diplomatic progress between the two Koreas has been frozen.
In other words, despite his promises, Moon failed to conclude a peace agreement that
would formally put an end to the Korean War once and for all.
Because, for those of you who don't know, the Korean War did not officially end in 1953.
A simple armistice, a ceasefire, was signed that year.
So technically the two countries are still at war.
Well, the fact is that despite his promises, Moon did not achieve that diplomatic goal
either.
And do you know what?
It's almost better that way.
Better not to imagine the concessions he would have had to make to take on that role.
Finally, to conclude this list of major political failures and unfulfilled promises, we have
perhaps the issue that has weighed most heavily in the defeat of the ruling party's candidate:
the housing policy.
A topic we have already talked about here on VisualPolitik.
Since we made that video up until the recent elections, about two years have gone by and
things not only did not improve but they actually got worse.
Take a look.
The average home price in Seoul, which is the most stressed area, has increased by 35%
since Moon Jae-in came to power, and about 50% since 2015.
In some areas of the city, housing prices have more than doubled!
To give you an idea, this means that a South Korean who wants to buy an average apartment
of about 880 square feet or 82 square meters in Seoul today will have to fork out more
than $970,000 on average, when only three years earlier, in 2017, that same apartment
would have cost about $590,000.
So of course, news headlines like this came as no surprise.
Well, at least in this case they have admitted it.
That's something.
As you can imagine, this has greatly disappointed young people who fervently trusted Moon in
2017.
You may not remember but he was described almost as the South Korean Obama.
Of course, here on VisualPolitik we were not at all surprised by what happened.
Most of Moon's measures were aimed at limiting demand and very few at increasing the supply
of housing.
In short, these were the major mistakes that led to a historic change of course in South
Korea.
A change of course, however, that has come about by a hair’s breadth and, to tell the
truth, with little enthusiasm on the part of South Koreans.
It has to be said.
But now the question we need to ask is: What plans does Yoon Seok-yeol have for South Korea?
Well, let's take a look.
Yoon Seok-yeol's narrow victory threatens to set South Korean politics in a whirlwind.
For domestic politics, but also for foreign policy.
And if there is one thing that characterizes Yoon, it is precisely that he is an unusual
character.
A very peculiar character.
Yoon Seok-yeol openly declares himself to be anti-feminist and in the campaign he liked
to boast about it.
He’s also a follower of the Protestant Christian congregation of the Yeouido Full Gospel Church.
We are talking about a religious congregation of some 800,000 members that is one of the
most conservative in Korea, and whose leaders spearhead the anti-LGTB
movements in the country.
On the other hand, the former Attorney General is, in economic matters, a follower of Mises
and Friedman's theories regarding the defense of the free market.
He is a strong supporter of deregulation and low taxes.
In fact, he is expected to put a technical profile close to these ideas at the helm of
the country's economy.
But, let's make all this a little more concrete.
We have already told you about the main factors that have contributed to the defeat of the
ruling party after Moon's presidency.
So now the question is: what exactly are the new president's proposals to meet all these
challenges?
Well, one of the policies he advocated during his campaign was to bet again on nuclear energy.
Yes, Moon's government canceled the construction of several reactors, but now the new president
believes that atomic energy is the best way for South Korea to obtain abundant, clean
and cheap energy for decades.
In fact, when he appointed his panel of experts for the presidential transition committee,
several names of nuclear energy experts could be seen.
Quite a statement of intent.
Then, with regard to housing, undoubtedly one of the country's major social concerns,
Yoon has pledged to promote public-private partnerships to build 2.5 million housing
units nationwide during his five-year term.
Of these, 1.3 million will be in Seoul.
That's on the supply side.
On the fiscal side Yoon says he will do just the opposite of what Moon has done: ease restrictions
on mortgages and reduce the capital gains tax.
He has also proposed revising the real estate tax for multiple property owners in order
to reduce the price of rents.
This is a topic that has been getting a lot of attention in South Korea lately.
Just think, according to the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, it would take an average
20-year-old South Korean a century to finish paying for a normal apartment in Seoul on
his or her own.
One hundred years!
In fact, according to a poll by The Herald Business and the Korea Society Opinion Institute,
1 in 4 voters believe that the stability of the housing market is the new president's
greatest challenge.
But that's not the end of it.
South Korea is a country with a complicated foreign policy.
The South Korean government has to deal with its communist neighbor to the north and delicately
balance relations with China, Japan and the United States.
A balance that quite often becomes a headache.
Well, all indications are that the next government will make a shift in its foreign policy to
become more pro-US and also pro-Japan.
Obviously this may cool things down a bit with China.
Without looking too far, the new president proposes such things as increasing the US
THAAD anti-missile batteries.
A deployment that has already cost South Korea a trade and tourism boycott by China.
But okay, by this point in the video I know what many of you are thinking: but what about
North Korea?
Well...
Do I need to remind you of Pyongyang's reaction?
Like all conservative presidents, Yoon is in favor of returning to a hard line with
Pyongyang.
In this case, he even favors trying to get the United States to deploy more strategic
weapons in Korea.
Of course, he has also made it clear that he is willing to continue peace talks.
The point is that whatever he does, we are likely to see a constant tug-of-war between
the two Koreas, which has basically been the norm for decades.
Or maybe not, who knows, in Korea the degree of unpredictability is always quite high.
Finally, let's take a look at the economic measures that the new president has promised.
The measures with which he hopes to restore the economic vitality to South Korea.
Well, Yoon has announced a relentless fight against inflation, reducing bureaucracy in
the economy with up to 80 fewer regulations for companies, and making the labor market
more flexible, for example, so that workers can work more overtime, something that was
capped by the Moon government.
He has also promised to work with Samsung Electronics to narrow the gap it currently
has with Taiwan's TSMC, the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer.
This is something the new president considers strategic from both an economic and national
security standpoint.
As we have mentioned in past videos and patreon bulletins, semiconductors are something of
a holy grail for the economies of Taiwan and South Korea, and for advanced technologies
in general in the 21st century.
And from this point on, on the remaining issues, Yoon's plans are unclear for the moment.
So here on VisualPolitik we will be paying close attention to how this apparent political
flip-flop takes place, in which South Korea has gone from having a president who was compared
to Obama to one who is being compared to Ronald Reagan.
Only time will tell whether or not this really is an exaggeration.
For now, it's your turn: Do you think that the new president will be able to correct
South Korea's main problems with what you have seen?
Will South Korea experience the kind of economic renaissance as Yoon predicts?
What will happen to relations with China and North Korea?
Leave us your comments below and, if you liked this video, don't forget to like and subscribe
to VisualPolitik so you don't miss any of our upcoming news.
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Once again, thank you for watching.
All the best and see you next time.