SEOUL, Feb 16 (NNN-YONHAP) – South Korea’s presidential election campaigning, officially kicked off yesterday, for a 22-day run, ahead of the election, to be held on Mar 9.
A total of 14 candidates are competing for the South Korean presidency, of a single five-year term, according to the National Election Commission.
During the campaigning period, candidates are allowed to make speeches in open spaces with loudspeakers, distribute leaflets about campaign pledges, and do the ad campaigns on TV and radio.
This will be the first presidential election to be held after the legal voting age was lowered from 19 to 18, in 2020.
COVID-19 patients and those under quarantine will be allowed to vote on election day for one and a half hours, from 6:00 p.m. local time, after the end of regular polling.
Opinion poll results will be banned from being released, from Mar 3, or six days before the election, to block the results from affecting the choice of voters.
According to the latest survey by Realmeter, support for Lee Jae-myung, a presidential candidate for the governing Democratic Party, rose one percentage point over the week, to 39.1 percent, last week.
Support for the main conservative opposition People Power Party’s Yoon Suk-yeol slipped 1.8 percentage points to 41.6 percent, last week.
Ahn Cheol-soo of the centrist People’s Party won 7.7 percent of support, followed by Sim Sang-jeung of the progressive Justice Party with 2.8 percent.
The results were based on a poll of 3,040 voters, conducted from Feb 6 to 11. It had plus and minus 1.8 percentage points in margin of error, with a 95 percent confidence level.– NNN-YONHAP
