Halloween Tragedy Is a Test For a Deeply Unpopular Leader
Echoes of a past disaster must inform South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s response to the deaths of over 150 revelers in a crowd surge in Seoul.
A nation in grief.
Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/BloombergA nightmarish disaster whose victims are predominantly the young. A right-of-center leader whose popularity is sliding. A political flashpoint potentially in the making once the nation absorbs the tragedy.
It’s not hard to find echoes between the killing of more than 150 people crushed in a Halloween crowd surge in Seoul on Saturday, and the deaths of more than 300 people, mainly high-school students, in the 2014 sinking of the Sewol ferry. In both cases, officialdom failed the nation’s youth, resulting in tragic, avoidable events on a scale that is scarcely imaginable. The public will demand answers.