On March 9, South Korea held its presidential elections. It was the closest presidential race in the nation’s history — even the primary elections had very fierce competition. Due to this, many South Korean citizens were very uncertain about how the election would unfold and anxiously awaited the announcement of the results.

Now that these results have been released and the future president has been selected, namely opposition candidate Yoon Seok-Yeol of the People Power Party, The Gazelle asked South Korean nationals at NYU Abu Dhabi about their thoughts surrounding the election.

Some South Korean students anonymously expressed their concerns regarding the results before the president was officially decided. “There were a lot of things going on before the election,” one student said. “[It made it] hard to guess who would be the final candidates for both parties.” Moreover, the news articles showed approval ratings for each candidate regularly and they changed very often.

As two candidates, Lee Jae-Myung from the Democratic Party of Korea and Yoon Seok-Yeol from the People Power Party had close counts until the very end, the student watched the live stream of the voting count with bated breath as they couldn’t guess who would be elected as the next president.

“Because it was my first time voting, I read news articles on the candidates and the election quite often to catch up with what’s going on,” said another student. Since this was the biggest election in South Korea, they wanted to be well aware of the election and candidates.

“Both candidates had several scandals, so I also looked up how people think about them and the scandals,” they added.

A third student expressed that while the election process was riddled with scandals, the voting participation rate reached its highest among youth in their twenties. They also said that their parents, who had not voted in the previous election, decided to vote in this election because “they wanted to [kind of] see change.”

Given that the voting participation rate was extremely high this election, even with the Covid-19 pandemic complicating South Korea’s system of in-person voting, it can be seen that this was a special election that had special significance to a lot of citizens.

There were many instances of suspected election fraud, which was worsened by the voting of Covid-19 patients. Some Covid-19 patients gave their ballots to someone else instead of directly putting [them] in the box. A student expressed concern: “I was shocked to read news on these cases because this is not what should happen in a democratic country.” They also emphasized that these administrative problems should be addressed in the future and the government should make sure such things don't happen again.

Another student revealed that while they did not want to specify the candidate they voted for, they were overall dissatisfied with the results. They were disappointed that the country was so polarized and believed that the incoming government must work hard to unify the people. Even among different age groups, there was a visible gender divide, which caused great concern.

After the messy presidential election, many South Koreans expressed their disappointment regarding the fraud and scandals involved in this process. The scandals were so severe that one student expressed that while they had a “strong preference” for their candidate of choice, it was because of “moral scandals relating to the candidates rather than a political thing.” They also emphasized that it felt like an election where the voters had “to decide on who is less evil.”

Even though many NYUAD students were first time voters in this year’s presidential elections, they have already noticed flaws in the country’s democratic system. At the same time, they are still hopeful that future elections will be appropriately managed so that true democracy can be achieved. With Yoon Seok-Yeol from the People Power Party as the next South Korean president, the citizens await new changes to the country after Moon Jae-In’s term.