Correct Answer : Yoon Suk-yeol
The opposition conservative Yoon Suk-yeol has won South Korea's presidential election, Yonhap reported early Thursday(10th Mar 2022), propelling a political novice and avowed anti-feminist to the helm of Asia's fourth largest economy.
After a bitter, hard-fought election campaign, Yoon, formerly a top government prosecutor who has never held elected office, was declared winner early Thursday after rival Lee Jae-myung from the incumbent Democratic Party conceded defeat.
"This is a victory of the great South Korean people," Yoon told cheering supporters, who were chanting his name at the country's National Assembly.
Despite a campaign dominated by mud-slinging between frontrunners Yoon and Lee, voter turnout was 77.1 percent, including record early voting, with interest strong and the policy stakes high in the country of some 52 million.
The two parties are ideologically poles apart, and Yoon's victory looks set to usher in a more hawkish, fiscally conservative regime after five years under outgoing President Moon Jae-in's dovish liberals.
It is also a dramatic victory for the opposition People Power party, who were left in disarray in 2017 after their president Park Gung-hye was impeached.
It could restart the "cycle of revenge" in South Korea's famously adversarial politics, analysts say, where presidents serve just a single term of five years and every living former leader has been jailed for corruption after leaving office.
On the campaign trail, Yoon had threatened to investigate outgoing President Moon Jae-in, citing unspecified "irregularities".
Source : NDTV
