Day: March 12, 2022

I didn’t follow the run-up to last week’s presidential election in South Korea very closely. In fact I lost track of it happening, and it took a local acquaintance more tuned in to world events than I to point out to me that it had happened last Wednesday.

But looking at and thinking about the results, I’m mostly unsurprised. I remain, as always, intrigued by the electoral map, though.

The ancient province of Jeolla stands out as starkly and quite isolatedly leftist – more so than previous maps I’ve looked at, it seems to me.

Meanwhile, suburban Seoul seems more consistently left-leaning, too. But the rest of the country swung even more rightward, more than compensating for these leftward trends in those limited areas, and ensuring a victory for the conservative, Mr Yoon.

I would almost hazard to say the map looks like evidence of increasing polarization. Which is to say, perhaps an Americanization of Korean politics? I don’t know.