South Korea’s new leftwing president, Lee Jae-myung, said his country faced a “tangled web of overlapping crises” as he was sworn into office on Wednesday after an emphatic election win.
In his inaugural address in Seoul, Lee vowed to overhaul what he said was an outdated and over-centralised model of development in Asia’s fourth-largest economy, which he blamed for fuelling inequality and polarisation.
Lee, 61, won a snap election on Tuesday, ending a political crisis sparked by then-president Yoon Suk Yeol’s brief declaration of martial law in December. South Korea’s equity markets rose on Wednesday to their highest level in 10 months.