The South Korean ruling party’s candidate for president has downplayed the prospect of the future reunification of the Korean peninsula, as the country’s voters tire of decades of fruitless diplomacy with the North.
Lee Jae-myung of the progressive Democratic party, whose manifesto includes a commitment to “seek unification through peaceful measures”, told reporters on Thursday that competition between the two Koreas in terms of ideology and efforts to prove the superiority of each system “has no meaning” and did not offer the prospect of “real gains any more”.
Lee, the governor of South Korea’s most populous province, has questioned the effectiveness of US-led sanctions on North Korea. He praised former US president Donald Trump’s efforts to engage directly with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as “very useful and desirable” but said that “[Trump’s] approach was too rosy, trying to strike a ‘big deal’ to resolve all issues all at once”.