Yoon Seok-yeol's polling falters amidst family disclosures

Balgan Agae ( 빨간아재 ) independent news journalist on youtube in South Korea reporting live from the the Uijonbu court building, says that Choi Eun-soon, conservative candidate Yoon Seok-yeol’s mother in law was just found guilty in a separate case of submitting a forged certification of bank deposit document in the amount of billions of won as part of a business transaction. The court sentenced her to only one year in prison but apparently she was not committed to confinement. This appears to be the same courthouse where she was sentenced earlier this year to three years in prison for illegal receipt of medical insurance funds. At that time she had been taken into confinement. Then when the review court took her appeal under consideration she was released pending her appeal. It may be that this trial level court is now reluctant to confine her under the circumstances.

The latest NBS poll shows that Yoon’s popular support has fallen below 30 percent. So democratic candidate Lee Jae-myung now leads Yoon 35% to 29% breaking out of the typical margin of error of 3 percent on these type phone polls with approximately 1000 respondents. ( NBS 여론조사 Dec 22 reported by 언론 알아야 바꾼다 youtube ) Depending on the poll source, there will be different numbers, but this is the first time that Lee has taken such a substantial lead over Yoon in the polls in recent weeks. It’s fairly apparent that Yoon’s camp was trying to put the matter of the alleged corruption of his family on the back burner with the unorthodox visit with the ROK army unit at the DMZ but it may not work.* Yoon has said that his wife won’t be participating in the campaign, and that she won’t operate an office of the first lady in the Blue House as he seeks to distance himself from his wife and her family. Ironically there was a report yesterday, that Hong Jun-pyo the most popular conservative candidate whom the People’s Power Party convention did not select as their candidate, announced that he was giving up his desire to become president. What timing! There are reports of infighting and resignations on Yoon’s campaign committee allegedly over the matter of how to handle the recent disclosures of alleged misrepresentations on his wife’s resumes submitted in support of applications to colleges for teaching positions over the years.

*UN Command investigating alleged armistice breaches after presidential candidate’s DMZ trip, Korea Times Dec 22;
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2021/12/205_320990.html?tw

Korea times also criticized the democratic Moon administration today for not taking pro-democracy positions against China, relative to Taiwan and Hong Kong issues. Democratic candidate Lee Jae-myung’s position on foreign policy issues is similar to Moon’s. Yoon, the conservative presidential candidate, thus far has been the favored candidate by the US and Japan. The official cut off for registration of presidential candidates is February 13-14, 2022, for the March 9, election.