Moon Jae-in of the liberal Minjoo Party has been elected the new President of South Korea.
Now it seems that Macron will have a partner in South Korea. Moon Jae-in is a former civil rights attorney . He was imprisoned in the 1970s for protesting against the former dictator Park Chung-hee and later served as chief of staff under President Roh Moo-hyun.
Moon is not likely to be supportive of Trumpist foreign policy or commitment to rule by family owned wealth. The candidate declared a decade of hardline policy towards Pyongyang a failure and vows to reform South Korea’s powerful chaebols, family-owned conglomerates that dominate South Koreas’s economy. Moon has spoken of his desire for South Korea to seize the policy initiative from Washington after months of drift under a caretaker president and confusion wrought by Trump’s as hoc foreign policy.
“South Koreans are more concerned that Trump, rather than … Kim Jong-un, will make a rash military move, because of his outrageous tweets, threats of force and unpredictability,” said Duyeon Kim, a visiting fellow at the Korean Peninsula Future Forum in Seoul, in Foreign Affairs magazine.