SEONGNAM, South Korea — South Korea’s leading presidential candidate held the final news conference of his campaign on Monday in the city where he toiled in factories as a child and later became mayor, pledging to “open a new future” for the country.
Lee spoke from the same underground prayer room where, he said, in 2004, he decided to enter politics. He was born in 1963 to a poor family in the eastern city of Andong and moved to Seongnam, just south of Seoul, as a child, where he worked as an industrial laborer in his youth before eventually training to become a lawyer.
