North Korea's state media on Friday reported conservative opposition candidate Yoon Suk-yeol was elected as South Korea's president in the first coverage of the news by Pyongyang since the election.
"Yoon Suk-yeol, a candidate of the conservative opposition 'People Power Party,' won by a narrow margin in the 20th 'presidential election' held in South Korea on March 9," the North's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in a one paragraph report.
Yoon was elected president earlier Thursday with the smallest-ever 0.73 percentage-point gap over liberal Democratic Party (DP) candidate Lee Jae-myung.
It is deemed unusual for the North to be so quick in responding to the election of a conservative South Korean president through a report by its stated-controlled media, even with his or her name mentioned. The South's conservative leaders have taken a relatively hawkish stance on the nuclear-armed North.
The KCNA carried a report on the election of Park Geun-hye in 2012 a day after in a brief report without using her name. When Lee Myung-bak won the presidential election in 2007, North Korean media kept mum for a week. (Yonhap)
