On Mar. 9 South Koreans are electing their new president, and the outcome is far from assured: most surveys show Yoon Seok-youl of the conservative opposition People Power Party leading Lee Jae-myung of the ruling center-left Minjoo Party by two to five percentage points, but at least one poll has Lee with a slim edge over Yoon. The shock announcement Thursday that a third candidate, centrist Ahn Cheol-soo, was dropping out to endorse Yoon led some to declare a certain victory for the latter but Ahn's last-minute declaration to quit, going against his earlier promise to run till the end, may not guarantee that all his supporters will rally behind Yoon.
That the race remains so tight has prompted some head-scratching. You might be thinking, hasn't South Korea done a great job handling the Covid pandemic, and shouldn't that work in the ruling party's favor? Indicators also suggest that the economy is in good shape, with both the GDP and exports growing.
Indeed, incumbent president Moon Jae-in, from Lee's own party, is enjoying an approval rating of 45 percent according to polling firm Gallup Korea. That's an unusually high figure for an outgoing South Korean leader (for comparison, Moon's predecessor Park Geun-hye was seeing single-digit support before she was ousted from power in March 2017 by the constitutional court over corruption and abuse of power).