Moon Jae-in
Moon Jae-in was born in a refugee camp to parents who had fled North Korea, and spent his presidency trying to make peace with it. His parents came south on an American ship in the evacuation of Hungnam in 1950. He was expelled from university and jailed for protesting against the Yushin constitution, served in the special forces, and became a human rights lawyer in Busan in partnership with Roh Moo-hyun. He was Roh's chief of staff and the friend who identified his body. He was elected in May 2017, two months after Park Geun-hye was removed by the Constitutional Court following the candlelight demonstrations, which had brought millions into the streets without a serious injury. He came in with a mandate to clean out the relationship between the presidency and the conglomerates. 2018 was the year the engagement worked, briefly. North Korea sent a team to the Winter Olympics at Pyeongchang, the two leaders met three times, and Moon arranged and pushed the Singapore meeting between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. He spoke to a crowd of a hundred and fifty thousand in Pyongyang. The process collapsed at Hanoi in 2019 and nothing agreed survived it. At home he raised the minimum wage sharply, cut the maximum working week to fifty-two hours, and ran a pandemic response built on testing and contact tracing that kept South Korea open without a national lockdown and made it a reference case. Housing prices in Seoul rose beyond the reach of the young, which is the main reason his party lost the presidency by less than a percentage point in 2022. He left with an approval rating above forty per cent, unusual for a Korean president, and his two predecessors were both in prison.
- Lived: 1953 CE – ?
- Nationality: South Korean
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
