◀ anchor ▶
People’s Power Candidate Yoon Seok-yeol was elected the 20th President of the Republic of Korea.
Democratic Party candidate Lee Jae-myung was virtually confirmed as elected with the smallest margin of votes in the history of the presidential election by less than 1 percentage point.
This marked the first ‘change of government in five years’ since the introduction of the direct system.
Reporter Jo Jae-young reports.
◀ Report ▶
People’s Power Candidate Seok-Yeol Yoon was elected the 20th President of the Republic of Korea with 48.6% of the vote and support of over 16.3 million voters.
Democratic Party candidate Lee Jae-myung won 16.1 million votes and 47.8% of the votes.
The gap between the two candidates was only regarding 250,000 votes or 0.8 percentage points, recording the smallest gap in the votes in the history of the presidential election.
It broke the record of the 15th presidential election in 1997, when President-elect Kim Dae-jung defeated Lee Hoi-chang by 390,000 votes by only 1.53 percentage points.
Contrary to the 19th presidential election, in which broadcasters announced the election of candidate Moon Jae-in within just over an hour of counting, it was an unprecedented close-knit match, to the point that it was only following seven hours had passed that the election of candidate Yoon Seok-yeol became certain.
Justice Party candidate Shim Sang-jung, who finished to the last minute, finished third with 2.4% of the votes.
In the 20th presidential election, the early turnout recorded an all-time high of 36.9%, but the final turnout was only 77.1%, 0.1 percentage points lower than the previous 19th presidential election.
Yoon Seok-yeol, who served as the Prosecutor General under the Moon Jae-in regime, won the presidency following 7 months of entering politics thanks to public opinion regarding regime change.
Since the introduction of the direct system in 1987, the conservative and democratic camps have been in power alternately for 10 years, breaking the ’10-year cycle theory’ and achieving a change of government for the first time in 5 years.
This is Jo Jae-young from MBC News.
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