South Korea has endured 6 months of political turmoil. What can we expect in Lee's presidency?

SEOUL, South Korea -- Images from the predetermination of South Korea's caller president, wide Lee Jae-myung, are everything you’d expect to spot successful 1 of the world’s astir vibrant democracies.

Peaceful. Orderly. And, due to the fact that this is South Korea, compulsively eye-catching, with crowds singing raucously on to blaring K-pop, dancers bouncing successful intimately choreographed sequences, and color-coordinated outfits for the 2 front-runners and their supporters — bluish for Lee, who was inaugurated Wednesday for a single, five-year term, reddish for the distant runner-up, blimpish Kim Moon Soo.

What the pictures don’t seizure is the absolute turmoil of the past six months, making Tuesday 1 of the strangest — and, possibly, astir momentous -- election days since the state emerged successful the precocious 1980s from decades of dictatorship.

Since Dec. 3, South Koreans person watched, stunned, arsenic an bonzer series of events unfolded: Then-South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, a archetypal since the dictatorship. In response, lawmakers, leaping fences and jostling with heavy equipped soldiers, elbowed their mode into a besieged parliament to ballot the declaration down. Yoon was past impeached and removed from bureau and now, conscionable 2 months after his fall, different president has taken office.

Here is simply a look astatine Lee’s victory, the startling events that acceptable up the election, and the challenges Lee faces to heal a federation divided on a big of governmental and societal responsibility lines.

They are, successful a way, older than the nation.

The Korean Peninsula was initially divided into a Soviet-backed northbound and U.S.-backed southbound aft World War II. The states formalized the part successful 1948, and the 1950-53 Korean War made it permanent, dividing the rivals on the Demilitarized Zone, 1 of the astir heavy equipped borders successful the world.

But the tensions spell beyond geography. During the agelong combat for ideology during South Korea's dictatorships, respective fractures arose that persist today: the contentions betwixt liberals and conservatives, but besides gaps betwixt affluent and poor, aged and young and men and women.

Since the extremity of dictatorship, implicit and implicit the state has seen its ideology tested.

By its ain leaders.

By its antagonistic neighbor to the north.

By each caller generation’s absorption to a tumultuous past of forced geographic division, war, dictatorship, and 1 of the astir breakneck economical turnarounds successful satellite history.

Preceding Tuesday’s election, thousands of protesters took to the streets, some supporting the deposed Yoon and denouncing him.

“Above all, the president indispensable bring unity among a divided and confused public, which was caused by the martial instrumentality declaration,” Park Soo Hyun, a 22-year-old student, said Wednesday.

Lee's enactment has a bulk successful parliament that volition presumably let the caller president a freer manus successful pushing done wide legislation, including much backing for payment programs and policies to code precocious surviving costs, joblessness and corruption.

Typically, liberals similar Lee person been much wary of South Korea's accepted allies, the United States and Japan, than conservatives. They person besides often looked for reconciliation with North Korea.

The United States sees South Korea arsenic a important buttress against China and Russia and North Korea’s increasing atomic capabilitie s. The South hosts astir 30,000 U.S. troops.

Lee, however, volition person to find a mode to support his wide basal blessed portion managing the narration with U.S. President Donald Trump, who has threatened Seoul with tariffs and has mostly been lukewarm astir the value of the alliance.

Lee has besides been dogged by a raft of corruption cases, and it’s not yet wide however overmuch of a resistance those volition beryllium connected his presidency.

"I volition marque definite determination is nary much subject coup d’état, successful which the powerfulness entrusted by the radical would ne'er beryllium utilized to intimidate people,” Lee said successful his triumph code aboriginal Wednesday morning, referring to the martial instrumentality decree.

Experts accidental it's a small of both. The past half-year has worsened already earthy divisions, adjacent arsenic it highlighted the underlying spot of a rough-and-tumble antiauthoritarian process.

“Fierce ideological divisions inactive infuse politics, which could impede South Korea’s chances to turn into a genuinely mature democracy," Duyeon Kim, a visiting prof astatine Yonsei University successful Seoul, wrote precocious for the Council connected Foreign Relations.

But Tuesday’s ballot and Wednesday’s inauguration signaled a instrumentality to a much mean democracy.

And adjacent the situation itself showed the resiliency of South Korea's institutions.

A assemblage helped lawmakers get past troops and into parliament to overturn the martial instrumentality decree. The soldiers who carried retired Yoon’s orders did truthful without enthusiasm and didn’t usage unit against the people, John Delury, a Korea adept and visiting prof astatine John Cabot University, said Tuesday.

Korean ideology is successful the people’s hands, helium said, not immoderate 1 person’s, adjacent the caller president's. Lee “enters bureau with a beardown mandate. But helium is not the savior of democracy," said Delury. "Korean radical saved it themselves. Now they are entrusting him not to bash immoderate much harm to it for the adjacent 5 years.”