He’s got Seoul: South Korea’s new leader

0:27The Economist is growing, some artists perform more abroad than at home. That's changing both the music and the business model of Afrobeats. And in Australia, the problem of dingoes has many facets. The tension between indigenous people, farmers, ecologists, politicians. Now, scientists have shown that much of the policy around culling the beasts hangs on a mistaken assumption.

1:02But first...

1:10After months of political instability, last night E.J. Meng was elected South Korea's president. His victory was a clear rejection of the conservative People Power Party. That was the one that former disgraced president Yoon Suk-yul belonged to. Yoon was impeached last year after he declared martial law, bringing protesters out onto the streets and prompting this unexpected election. As Yi acknowledged in his inaugural speech this morning, he has a lot to do.

1:43It is time to restore our democracy, he said, which has been destroyed by armored vehicles and rifles. But his list went on, including the need to mend the broken economy and restore national unity. So what can we expect from South Korea's new leader? First and foremost, Lee Jae-myung's victory is a resounding referendum on Yoon Suk-yeol's failed presidency and his authoritarian power grab last December. Noah Snyder is our East Asia bureau chief. Lee Jae-myung led the opposition to the declaration of martial law, rallying lawmakers and citizens to come out to the streets on the very night when it was imposed.

2:25And then he led the efforts to impeach Yoon Suk-yeol in the months that followed. His opponent in these elections, by contrast, was a loyal minister in Yoon's government who opposed his impeachment and really never fully apologized for the declaration of martial law itself. So with this victory, Lee Jae-myung has a chance to bring South Korea back from the brink to heal a divided country. But he faces myriad challenges both at home and abroad. Before we get to the challenges, Noah, just remind me why this election was called in the first place. It's a great question, Rosie. In fact, these elections were not supposed to happen.

3:07The next presidential elections in South Korea were scheduled for 2027. But the story of these snap elections really begins with parliamentary elections last year, when Lee Jae-myung's party, the Democratic Party, won a resounding majority. And that allowed them essentially to stymie the agenda of then-president Yoon Seok-yeol. He, in turn, took a drastic and ultimately unconstitutional step by declaring martial law late on December 3rd last year. He sent troops to try to take over the National Assembly and basically enact a power grab to get around his political opposition. The citizens of South Korea did not take lightly to this.

3:47They have memories of military dictatorships in their not-so-distant past. They came out on the streets to protest, and lawmakers led by Lee Jae-myung himself rallied to vote and overturn this martial law declaration. President Yoon was ultimately impeached, and that ushered in a period of political uncertainty, a power vacuum atop the South Korean state, a series of three acting presidents, acting, acting, acting presidents of differing authority. And finally, now we have a new leader with a mandate from the South Korean people. But the question for the next phase of the story is what kind of leader exactly Lee Jae-myung will be.

4:28So what do we know about Lee Jae-myung? What kind of leader will he be? His victory really caps an improbable personal journey. He was born into a deeply impoverished family. He had to drop out of school as a teenager and work in factories. He trained on his own to become a lawyer, eventually became a labor and human rights activist before entering politics and rising to be governor of South Korea's most populous province. He narrowly lost the presidential election in 2022 to former President Yun. He was stabbed in the neck during the parliamentary campaign last year by an assassin who was bent on preventing him from ever becoming president.

5:10And finally, he faced a spate of criminal allegations, which he has denied, which threatened to derail his campaign this year. So he's really a fighter, someone whose life and career is defined by, as he put it himself, making the impossible possible. So that's an unexpected path to politics in any country, right? But particularly South Korea. What can we then expect of his presidency? Well, that really is the key question as he enters office. He made his name essentially as a progressive populist. He was known, for example, for promising a universal basic income during the previous presidential campaign.

5:51He was quite critical, as Democratic Party members tend to be, of the Conservatives' foreign policy, in particular a perceived subservience to America and being essentially too friendly to Japan. He was also critical of how poor relations had gotten with China, Russia, and North Korea. But in recent months, he's recast himself essentially as a sensible moderate. When I met him earlier this year, along with our Asia editor, Emma Hogan, he told us that the party's guiding value now is pragmatism. And that's become his buzzword both for economic policy, where he's talking more about market-friendly reforms, and also foreign policy, where he's endorsed the alliance with America and even sounded positive about closer cooperation with Japan.

6:40However pragmatic he is, it's going to be a pretty tough gig though, isn't it? South Korea is very divided, the economy's battered. He's got a lot of things to deal with at home, hasn't he? I think the domestic issues are going to be his top priority, or at least he hopes they will be. The fallout from Yoon Suk-yeol's fiasco is still hanging over the country. Yun himself is facing criminal charges for leading an insurrection, and that trial is going to play out over the coming months. So there are a lot of things he needs to do to address the fallout from the last six months. But on top of that, he also, as you indicated, needs to address a really battered economy.

7:21South Korea's projected growth has been cut quite drastically this year, both as a result of the uncertainty at home and the tariffs that Donald Trump has imposed in America. And then there are longer term issues that if he has the bandwidth really could use some attention. Most prominently South Korea's demographic crisis, which is sapping its long term growth prospects. It has the lowest fertility rate of any country in the world at just 0.75 births per woman. And Noah, as you said, he's planning to shift South Korea's foreign policy too. That's right. And his first priority on the foreign policy side of things is almost certainly going to be America and the relationship with Donald Trump.

8:03There are tariffs that need to be negotiated away. And South Korean industry has been hit quite hard already by the levies Donald Trump imposed on cars and steel. On top of that, there's a kind of crisis looming in the security relationship between South Korea and America, essentially over whether America should keep the same number of troops stationed on the Korean peninsula as it has in the past, and whether those troops should continue to be dedicated to defending South Korea from its nuclear-armed northern neighbor, or whether they should be diverted to broader regional goals such as deterring China.

8:41Right. And you mentioned China there. Some people are presenting Yi as pro-China. Is that right? I don't think that's entirely fair. It is the critique from the conservatives in South Korea and even some conservatives in America who've latched on to those narratives. What he's arguing for essentially is a more balanced foreign policy, trying to maintain stable and even cooperative economic relationships with the Chinese, while also strengthening the alliance with America. The trick is that that balancing act is simply becoming harder and harder to achieve as America and China enter into a deeper and deeper confrontation.

9:22So the headline is, he's got a lot on his plate. That's right, Rosie. There was, of course, a brief sense of relief and even a smile crossing his face yesterday when the election results started to become clear. But in his speech during his inauguration, he acknowledged that South Korea faces a complex web of overlapping crises in every sphere. So indeed, a lot on his plate. Great to talk to you, Noah. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

10:07In 2023, Odumodu Black put out his first single, Declan Rice, and the song saw a fresh surge in streams recently after the British midfielder that the song was lamed after scored two free kicks in a tense football game. Oret Ogunbi is an Africa correspondent for The Economist. The Nigerian singer layers Pigeon English on a drill track and he likens Declan Rice's game-changing star power to his own. His growing global fame exemplifies something bigger. Lots of other African artists have had songs that have rocked stages from India to Brazil and this is becoming more and more common. Africa's diasporas are transforming its music and how it's being taken around the world.

10:51And both the sound and the business of Afrobeats are being completely reshaped as the music goes global. Orif, for those who aren't familiar with it, what is distinctive about the sound of Afrobeats? Rosie, you're asking a very difficult question here because how people define and categorize Afrobeats is actually quite contentious. But I would say that it's a West African genre, or rather a mega genre. It's always been a fusion of influences from Ghanaian highlife to Yoruba Juju music, and even a bit of funk. And it's also taken influences from Afrobeats. So that's minus the S. It's the jazzier, more instrumental, arguably more technically complex version of the sound that is most often associated with Fela Kuti.

11:37Think of his iconic songs like Zombie, literally sounds like a marching call. It's an explosion of sounds and drums and trumpets. These kinds of songs are much longer than the kinds of Afrobeats you see charting now.

11:57So take With You by David Doe and O'Malley, for example, that's barely three minutes long. So it sounds like it shouldn't all be lumped together under one name. Well, exactly. Lots of artists and producers are very particular about that. I think it's better to understand Afrobeats as an umbrella term, a bit of a mega genre. And within that, there is Afropop, there's Afrofusion, Afro-rave music. There's a lot of diversity that's coming from the continent, and you're hearing more of it as it's going global. You say that Afrobeats are being reshaped as they go global, but how popular are they exactly?

12:32So they've become increasingly popular since about the mid-2010s. In 2024 alone, there was a 34 % increase in streams, according to Spotify. So it's massively growing. After Nigeria, most listeners actually come from America, Britain, France and Germany, before any other African country. So as it's grown and moved, its sound is becoming more and more influenced by other sounds of the world. Because actually what we're seeing is a bit of a multidirectional diaspora influence. As much as the music is having an influence on the diaspora, the diaspora is itself having an influence on the music. Africans abroad have become a key conduit for taking that local art to fresher audiences from America to Europe.

13:11And in turn, they're helping mould the sound and kind of subtly change it. So what form is that change taking? So one way is clearly in the sound. They're made more digestible for a generation of TikTok dancers. Sometimes they're sped up to sound more like pop music. They also take influences from American hip-hop, for example. And we're seeing a lot more cross-genre collaborations and samples and interpolations. So take Rema, for example. He's one of the world's most streamed African artists. And he featured the American pop singer Selena Gomez on a remix for his 2023 hit song, Calm Down. Now, Calm Down became the first song ever led by an African artist to cross one billion streams on Spotify.

13:55And it's doubled that since. So that's just one example of how those cross-genre collaborations are becoming really, really successful around the world. In fact, there are many artists that now perform more abroad than they do at home. Burner Boy shut down Madison Square Garden and you can hear the Yoruba slang in the call and response as he's singing Ye through this massive New York arena And that sonic shift, so what we're seeing with collaborations what we're seeing with performances is also having implications for the business of Afrobeats And are these artists now making a lot more money then?

14:34Well, arguably yes, but there are lots of winners and it's not just the artists So international record labels and streaming platforms also tapped into what they noticed was a bit of a boom about a decade ago. And so with that sound that has become more global, so has the ownership become a bit more global. So Spotify paid 58 billion naira to rights holders of Nigerian music in 2024. And I say rights holders because the only rights holders aren't just the artists. A lot of them have deals that they've signed in collaboration with foreign record labels. so that means that a lot of the winnings from these really successful songs don't actually stay on the continent that's then complicated by streaming platforms because artists earn more from streams in richer countries than in poorer ones now when i asked spotify about this they said that that's because the royalties that artists get are proportional to the subscription prices and those vary widely across countries so for example you pay about a dollar and a half in ghana for a monthly spotify subscription but it costs you about 17 dollars in switzerland so So an artist being successful abroad obviously is better for them, but that also can then sway the creative choices that artists are making when they're in the studios, whether that's who they're collaborating with or what they want their music to sound like.

15:45So is there a risk then that we will no longer hear authentically African sounds? I don't think so. I think some people I spoke to see the diaspora as a bit of a middleman. You're taking what should be really authentically African sounds to the world, and not everyone is repackaging their music just to suit foreign tastes. But I think the question that people are asking is who benefits? How does the continent also benefit from the success of its music? The fact that African music is becoming more and more difficult to pigeonhole is a good thing. It's a testament of its success. It's a sign that it's doing well across the world.

16:19But to ensure that that is benefiting the artists and that that is benefiting the continent will take a much more intentional effort. Aura, great to have you back on the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Rosie.

16:44You dingoes have a good afternoon.

16:51I met up with Shakira Todd, who's the founder of Wildlife Surrounds, which is a conservation education centre situated in the tropical woodlands of northern Queensland in Australia. Yeah, he's going to go and sniff exactly where you're sitting and get your scent so he understands it. And I visited so I could spend time with her and some of her dingoes. Luke Lithgow writes about science for The Economist. So people will probably know what a dingo looks like. They're fairly famous Australian wildlife, but they're roughly the size of a large family dog. But they're very lean and muscular and they have pointed ears that stand straight up.

17:33But looks can be deceiving and, as Shakira knows, dingoes are not ordinary dogs. You know, since I've been working with captive dingoes over the last 10 years, dingoes probably have the same opinion as me, is that dogs are pretty stupid compared to dingoes. You know, dingoes are really intelligent. For a long time, people thought that wild dingoes have mated freely with other dogs. But their genetics tell another story. dingoes are in fact well on their way to becoming a completely distinct species. So talk me through that then. What do you mean by distinct species? Well, for a long time, the received wisdom in Australia is that there were three main types of dog in the bush.

18:17So you had purebred dingoes. So these arise from Asia thousands of years ago. Then about 200 years ago with the Europeans came domestic dogs, which are seen as good as pets. but once in the wild as feral dogs they're a threat and then there's this third category which is hybrids between your original dingoes and the new domestic dogs so that happens when a dingo and a dog would meet and create offspring and it used to be thought there were lots of these and therefore blurring between this kind of species lines between dingo and dog actually Shakira's dingoes are a really great example of why people thought this so while the classic dingo colour is kind of this rusty brown.

18:57One of her dingoes is black and white and tan. And people always assume that he and different coloured dingoes like him must have a bit of dog in them somewhere. You find dingoes like this all across Australia. But the new genetic testing techniques have revealed that this is not the case. And that in fact, dingo dog hybrids do not exist in anywhere near the numbers we originally thought. So native dingoes rarely breed with dogs at all. And in fact, most of the canines living out there in the bush are just pure dingo. And how did the genetic research bear this out? The turning point in our understanding came in 2023 when a study by Kylie Cairns at the University of New South Wales looked at the genomes of 391 supposed dingoes.

19:43So these were animals that were either expected to be pure dingo or dingo dog mongrels or even maybe misidentified feral dogs that people thought might be dingoes. And they compared these genomes with 152 domestic dogs. And the results showed that 70 % of these supposed wild dingoes actually had no dog ancestry in them whatsoever. And even more, there were no feral dogs and not even any first generation dingo dog hybrids identified. So it showed that what we previously thought about the hybridization really wasn't happening on the same scale at all. And then a further study by Andrew Weeks at the University of Melbourne suggested that even this finding underestimated the number of pure dingoes.

20:26And he proposed that the genetic signals, which marked these hybrids out to be hybrids, actually were originating thousands of years ago when dingoes and dogs first split from one another. So the conclusion here is that dingo dog mixing hardly ever happens. And when it does, the descendants rarely go on to have offspring of their own. And therefore, dingoes have preferentially bred with dingoes for so long that they're now on a trajectory towards becoming an entirely new species. Interesting in its own right, but what difference does it make for how people treat dingoes, dogs, this idea that there just aren't many hybrids?

21:03Well, Australia has a very strained history with dingoes. So right from the arrival of Europeans, they've been seen as a threat to livestock, to sheep in particular. And there's been a history of widespread culling. But more recently, people have warmed to dingoes. Obviously, for a very long time, Aboriginal peoples have seen dingoes as a very important animal. But increasingly amongst the Australian public, they're seen as this native animal, a key part of the ecosystem as Australia's main apex predator. The culling of dingoes is now branded as wild dog control. And the label wild dog can be used because there's this assumption that most dingoes out there, especially the ones living closer to people, are hybrids.

21:42And therefore it's seen as more palatable to be culling these dogs. However, these new studies obviously have blown this wild dog idea out of the water. And when you're culling wild dogs in Australia, now we understand that you're mostly culling pure dingoes. And so what do you think this new study suggests as regards the policies around culling? So I think there needs to be a greater conversation now between farmers and scientists and ecologists and the general public. about what a wild dog actually is. But for the meantime, these genetic revelations really have been generally ignored by farmers and state governments across Australia.

22:24One of the few exceptions is a state of Victoria. So the studies found that in Victoria, there's this very genetically isolated population of dingoes in the Northwest, and that is now protected. However, in the east of Victoria, they are still choosing to cull dingoes. The irony about culling is that by removing the social structures, by crashing the populations of dingoes, you're actually making them more likely to breed with domestic dogs. So you're more likely to see more dingo dog hybrids. You're also more likely to see behaviours that the farmers really don't like because you're removing the more experienced, mature dingoes and you're creating a population of lots of quite unruly young dingoes, and that could cause more problems down the track.

23:08So while genetics has helped Australians better understand dingoes and what their dingoes are, it is going to take a different kind of breakthrough to find ways to live more harmoniously with dingoes. Thanks very much for your time, Luke. Thank you, Jason.

23:41that's all for this episode of the intelligence we'll see you back here tomorrow