S. Korea's youth say government failing them

SEOUL — Outnumbered by older voters, underrepresented in parliament, ignored on the campaign trail: South Korea's young say the political system is failing them, and some are fighting back before Wednesday's election.

The poll to choose the National Assembly's 300 lawmakers will be the first vote in South Korean history, where voters aged 60 and older will outnumber those in both their 20s and 30s, official data showed.

This is partly demographics. South Korea has the world's lowest birthrate and is a rapidly aging society, with the number of marriages in free fall for decades and single-person households now the norm.

Politics is also dominated by older men. Male MPs aged over 50 account for more than 75 percent of the current National Assembly. Just 5.6 percent of candidates for Wednesday's election are under 40.

Lee Min-ji, a 23-year-old student at Seoul's Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, has spent the weeks before the election making handwritten posters trying to get young people to vote.

Like many young South Koreans, she points to a string of recent scandals as evidence that the government is failing the young. That includes the 2022 Halloween crowd crush in Itaewon, which killed more than 150 mostly young people and was blamed on a litany of official oversights.

Demographic crisis

"Young people are dying every day, while it's considered a problem that (we are) not getting married and not having children," one of her posters said, claiming that officials unfairly hold young people responsible for a demographic crisis that has been decades of bad policy in the making.

Just like many countries, voter turnout in South Korea is lower among the young. Just 57.9 percent of eligible voters in their 20s and 30s cast ballots in the last general election in 2020, compared with 79.3 percent for voters in their 60s and 70s, official statistics showed.

Only slightly more than 50 percent of voters between 18 and 29 said they planned to vote in Wednesday's election "no matter what", according to the latest Gallup Korea poll.

Experts said this is linked to growing dissatisfaction among young people.

While South Korea is seen as a global cultural powerhouse and known for strong semiconductor exports, domestically the younger generation is struggling, with cutthroat competition in education, fewer job opportunities and sky-high housing costs.

Suicide is the leading cause of death for South Koreans aged between 10 and 39, according to official statistics.

AGENCIES VIA XINHUA