Name: Yoon Suk-yeol (Korean alphabet: 윤석열 – Chinese characters: 尹錫悅)
Nationality: South Korean
Date of birth: December 18, 1960
Role: Former Attorney General of South Korea and presidential candidate
Yoon Suk-yeol was born in Seoul, into a family of academics; he studied law at Seoul National University and began his career in the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Metropolitan City of Daegu, the fourth largest in the country, in 1994.
In 2012, during the scandal of manipulating public opinion by the South Korean National Intelligence Service, Yoon accused his immediate superior of interfering with the ongoing investigation. The accusation costs him the demotion from Seoul headquarters to provincial administrations.
But it is in 2016, on the occasion of the scandal involving President Park Geun-hye and several directors of chaebol, including Lee Jae-yong, vice president of Samsung, of whose public prosecution he will personally direct the work, which rises to the headlines. Precisely the work carried out against large family-run conglomerates earned him his appointment, in 2017, as head of the Seoul Central District Attorney’s Office, first, the largest in the country, and later as Attorney General.
Although President Moon Jae-in strongly desired his appointment, there is no good blood between the two. During his tenure as Attorney General, the current presidential candidate investigates a cabinet member and criticizes Moon Jae-in’s reforms of the judiciary, which earned him criticism from supporters of the Democratic Party.
Currently, several polls show him as the most likely candidate to reside as a roommate in the Blue House. However, the advantage is just a few percentage points, much less than the summer preceding the elections. Prosecutor Yoon has already declared the Ministry of Equal Opportunities removal, a re-establishment of relations with Japan that have deteriorated with Moon, and the extension of the THAAD missile system on South Korean soil.
