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(SEOUL, South Korea) -- South Korea's ruling Democratic Party swept nationwide local elections Wednesday, tightening President Lee Jae Myung's grip on power one year into his term, though the conservative opposition captured Seoul's mayor's office.

The vote drew 61% turnout, the highest for a local election in three decades.

Lee enters his second year Thursday with approval ratings around 60%, according to South Korea's major pollsters. That is the second-highest at the one-year mark since 1987, behind only former President Moon Jae-in.

When South Koreans elected Lee a year ago, they did so in the wreckage of a constitutional crisis after then-President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law on Dec. 3, 2024, vowing to "eradicate the anti-state forces."

He sent troops toward the National Assembly to stop lawmakers from voting it down. The attempt failed within hours, and Yoon was impeached and removed by the Constitutional Court four months later, triggering the snap election that made Lee president.

Governing out loud

Lee has made the presidency unusually public. He live-streams weekly cabinet meetings, a first in Korean history, and his office briefs on camera far more than its predecessor.

Lee also uses social media to announce policy, rebut coverage he disputes, take questions and air his opinions -- often without the vetting a formal statement would get. Aides call it a deliberate effort to reach citizens directly rather than through the traditional layers of staff that usually filter a president.

"Unlike politicians before him, he's citizen-friendly -- clearly distinct," said Park Myoung-ho, a political science professor at Dongguk University.

His style has drawn criticism, however. In May, Lee used social media to attack Starbucks Korea over a promotion that critics linked to a 1980 massacre of pro-democracy protesters, branding the company "low-grade profiteers" guilty of "gutter-level behavior."

"Given how much power a president holds, it's too direct and too unfiltered," said Lee Hyun-woo, who teaches political process at Sogang University and warned that the president's posts are often misread because Koreans are used to presidents speaking in measured, formal language.

A record-breaking market

The benchmark KOSPI, which bottomed out near 2,300 in April 2025 after President Donald Trump's tariffs, has surged to a record high above 8,700, blowing past Lee's campaign pledge to reach 5,000. The rally has been catalyzed by a global boom in semiconductors and AI infrastructure that has lifted companies like Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.

But rising share prices have not reached many ordinary households across the country and home prices around Seoul are starting to climbing again and is testing one of Lee's central promises.

Walking the line between Washington and Beijing

Lee's central foreign-policy bet has been that South Korea no longer has to choose between its U.S. alliance and its largest trading partner, China -- an approach his government calls "national-interest-centered pragmatism" -- and within seven months of taking office, he had held summits with the leaders of the United States, China and Japan.

"On foreign policy, he's done better than expected," said Shin Yul, a political science and diplomacy professor at Myongji University.

But the results have been mixed. Lee repaired ties with Japan, but his January state visit to Beijing largely fell flat.

His pragmatism faced a major test in February when the war between Iran and a U.S.-Israeli coalition threatened the Strait of Hormuz, the route for much of South Korea's oil imports.

Lee's government leaned on national reserves, increased purchases of U.S. crude and secured replacement supplies from outside the region. A senior presidential official said the effort, together with the market's resilience, helped keep Lee's approval ratings steady through the spring.

Two presidents, two reckonings

In February, a Seoul court sentenced former President Yoon to life in prison for the martial-law attempt; his former defense minister got 30 years. To Lee's supporters it was accountability for an assault on democracy. To Yoon's base, it felt like political revenge.

But Lee carries his own legal shadow. He took office facing five criminal trials, including corruption, subornation of perjury and illegal fund transfers to North Korea, which were all frozen once he became president.

His Democratic Party then went further by pushing a special counsel that could cancel the charges against him outright -- a move Lee declined to endorse or oppose publicly.

To Shin, the silence was strategic. Lee's side, he said, "will try to get the charges dropped," likely using the special counsel "to pursue cancellation of the cases against him."

The push drew public backlash and many analysts read the local-election result as a warning from voters wary of a governing party clearing its own leader.

"This may be President Lee's Achilles' heel," said Park. "I suspect he himself feels a real burden over it."

For Lee Hyun-woo, the principle is simple: "Serving well and being remembered as a great president, and paying for crimes committed in the past, are entirely separate matters."

ABC News' Hakyung Kate Lee contributed to this report.

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SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea on Thursday unveiled a new facility to produce nuclear bomb fuels, with leader Kim Jong Un announcing plans to bolster the country’s nuclear forces “at an exponential rate.”

Some experts still question whether North Korea has functioning nuclear missiles that can reach the U.S. mainland. But the nuclear plant’s disclosure implies that Kim is eager to cement his country’s status as a nuclear power and has no intentions of placing his bomb program on a negotiating table.

After visiting the site on Wednesday, Kim said he and other top officials “confirmed the order of priority for implementing the ambitious future plan designed to beef up our state’s nuclear forces at an exponential rate,” according to the official Korean Central News Agency.
The site is likely a uranium enrichment plant

KCNA said the facility used “more sophisticated technology” but didn’t provide further details like its location. South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff assessed the site as a uranium enrichment plant and said it was closely coordinating with the United States to monitor North Korean nuclear activities.

KCNA photos showed Kim walking through narrow aisles lined with dense rows of silver tubes and pipes, in what appeared to be a centrifuge hall. Another image showed him speaking with senior officials in a meeting room, where a blurred graphic depicting a cone-shaped object was spread across a table. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the graphic showed a warhead design.

It’s the third time that North Korea has disclosed a uranium enrichment site. In 2010, North Korea showed one at its main Yongbyon nuclear complex to visiting American scholars, and in 2024, North Korea released photos of another covert uranium-enrichment plant, which experts believe was at its Kangson complex.

Experts say the newly disclosed site is likely an additional uranium enrichment facility that North Korea is suspected to have been building at Yongbyon.

“Based on a preliminary analysis, it appears that this facility is likely the newly added Yongbyon enrichment facility. It appears to have two levels and represents a substantial expansion of enrichment capability,” said Ankit Panda, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“North Korea’s ongoing nuclear expansion does not have a near-term end in sight,” he said.

Last September, South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young said that North Korea was operating a total of four uranium enrichment facilities including the Yongbyon complex, and that they were running everyday.

Kim wants nuclear weapons state

During his plant visit, Kim said the urgency for bolstering up the country’s nuclear war deterrent, both in quality and quantity, has grown because of confrontations with “the most ferocious enemies,” an apparent reference to the U.S. and South Korea.

Kim said exercising “the position of a nuclear weapons state” is his country’s “invariable” stand. He said North Korea’s nuclear materials production capacity has more than doubled compared with five years ago, a claim that cannot be verified independently.

Experts say Kim wants an international recognition as a nuclear state so that he could demand the lifting of U.N. economic sanctions. They say Kim would ultimately push for arms reductions talks with the U.S. as a way to win concessions in return for a partial surrender of his nuclear capability.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to resume diplomacy with Kim, but the North Korean leader responded the Americans must first drop its demand for North Korea to denuclearize as a precondition for talks.

Some question North Korea’s nuclear program

Since his first round of nuclear diplomacy collapsed in 2019, Kim has performed a provocative run of weapons tests and vowed repeatedly to “exponentially” expand the country’s nuclear arsenal.

This led to many experts believing North Korea now likely has nuclear missiles capable of striking the U.S. mainland. But some still note North Korea hasn’t proved it mastered last-remaining technological hurdles to obtain such missiles, including ensuring its warheads survive the conditions of atmospheric reentry. They say North Korea also need to perfect technologies to place multiple nuclear warheads on a single missile to defeat U.S. missile shields.

A senior South Korean official told lawmakers in 2018 that North Korea was estimated to have manufactured between 20 and 60 nuclear weapons, but some experts now put the size of the North’s arsenal at more than 100 warheads.

In 2023, North Korea unveiled a type of battlefield nuclear warheads. Some analysts speculated the warhead’s unveiling might be a prelude to a nuclear test. But North Korea hasn’t carried out a test, which would be its seventh detonation overall and the first since September 2017.

BEIRUT (AP) — The leader of the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group has rejected the latest ceasefire agreement reached between Israel and the Lebanese government, demanding a complete Israeli withdrawal.

Naim Kassem, in a written statement read on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV on Thursday, said the agreement’s demand that Hezbollah fighters leave southern Lebanon under fire would mean “surrender, defeat and achieving the enemy’s goals.”

“What we are concerned about is an end to the aggression, ceasefire and Israel’s withdrawal,” Kassem said. “We did not make any commitment to any party to stop resisting as long as there is occupation,” he added.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

BEIRUT (AP) — Israeli strikes killed at least four people in Lebanon, according to local authorities, and a U.N. peacekeeper was killed in the crossfire on Thursday. The latest violence came after another ceasefire agreement was announced in the fighting between Israel and the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group.

The ongoing fighting in Lebanon, where Israeli forces have seized large swaths of the south, threatens efforts to end the Iran war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a key transit point for oil and gas whose closure has jolted the world economy.

Iran has demanded that any lasting truce extend to Lebanon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces elections later this year, wants to press ahead with Israel’s offensive until Hezbollah no longer poses a threat. Israeli troops have seized around a fifth of Lebanon since Hezbollah began launching rocket and drone attacks in solidarity with Iran days into the wider war.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who faced a rare rebuke from Congress on Wednesday, has sought to downplay the diplomatic deadlock and the failure of declared ceasefires to end the fighting, telling reporters that in the Middle East, “a ceasefire is when you’re shooting in a more moderate manner.”
Peacekeeper killed in crossfire

A Serbian peacekeeper was killed, and two other peacekeepers were wounded, when a mortar struck their location near Marjayoun, a Christian-majority town that has seen intense fighting, according to the U.N. mission, known as UNIFIL, and Serbia’s Defense Ministry.

Neither said whether the mortar fire came from Israel or Hezbollah.

Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said a drone strike killed a motorcyclist and wounded four people in the village of Maaroub. It said airstrikes on the village of Sohmor in the Bekaa Valley, in eastern Lebanon, killed three people and wounded others. It also reported airstrikes in other areas of the south.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli military, which has warned people not to go into parts of southern Lebanon where it says it is striking Hezbollah facilities.
Fighting has raged despite declared ceasefires

Hezbollah resumed its rocket fire days after Israel and the United States launched their surprise attack on Iran on Feb. 28. Before then, Israel had regularly carried out strikes in Lebanon against what it said were militant targets, often killing civilians, despite an earlier truce reached in 2024.

In the southern city of Sidon, many residents reacted to the ceasefire announcement with skepticism, saying previous agreements had failed to stop the violence.

“Every few days a ceasefire is announced, but people keep getting killed,” said Mayada Hijazi.

“It’s all talk and no action,” said Salah Nassab. “We keep going back to our homes and then we get displaced again, back and forth. We’re very tired.”

In the latest fighting, Israeli troops have pushed further into southern Lebanon than at any time since the end of Israel’s 1982-2000 occupation. It now occupies arouns a fifth of the country.

More than 3,500 people have been killed in Lebanon and over 1.2 million have been displaced. The fighting has killed 27 Israeli soldiers and three civilians.

The ceasefire came from ongoing Israeli-Lebanese talks

The latest declared ceasefire came about through U.S. brokered talks held between Israel and Lebanon’s government, which accuses Hezbollah of dragging the country into war and had made efforts to disarm it before the latest hostilities.

The ceasefire does not officially include Hezbollah and calls for Lebanon’s armed forces to take control of security zones in Lebanon from which the militants would be banned. Hezbollah has said it will only adhere to a ceasefire if Israel halts its attacks and begins withdrawing from the country.

Lebanese President Joseph Aoun on Thursday called the new agreement “the last chance to enter a final and comprehensive ceasefire.” He said Lebanon was ready to implement Wednesday’s deal once he receives responses from relevant factions in Lebanon, including Hezbollah. The United States — and Trump himself — would determine how and when the deal is implemented, he told journalists on Thursday.

The agreement states that Hezbollah “is not just an enemy of Israel and an enemy of America, but that it is an enemy of Lebanon” and calls for dismantling it. The government has promised to do so in the past but does not have the capabilities to disarm Hezbollah by force.

The latest agreement did not say when Israel would withdraw from southern Lebanon but said the U.S. would support the Lebanese army as it works to assert control in areas where Hezbollah has long wielded power.

Iran has demanded a durable Lebanon ceasefire

A top Iranian general on Thursday reiterated Tehran’s demand for a full ceasefire in Lebanon and called for Israel to pull troops back to where they were when the wider war began. At that time, Israel held five strategic points along the border.

“Supporting the resistance in Lebanon is the duty of all of us, and eliminating Israel from the region is an achievable goal for Muslims,” Esmail Qaani, the head of the Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force, was quoted as saying by the semiofficial Fars and Tasnim news agencies.

As diplomatic efforts have repeatedly faltered, Iran and the U.S. have traded fire in and around the Strait of Hormuz, which remains effectively closed. Before the war, around a fifth of the world’s oil and gas, as well as large shipments of fertilizer and other goods, passed through the narrow waterway.

The U.S. has targeted what it says are Iranian threats to commercial shipping and its own forces, while Iran has launched missile and drone attacks on Gulf states hosting U.S. troops.

A strike Wednesday on a commercial airport in Kuwait that is also used by American forces for logistics and refueling killed an Indian national and wounded more than 60 people, including passengers and workers. Iran denied carrying out the strike.

___ Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Metz from Ramallah, West Bank. Associated Press reporter Malak Harb in Beirut contributed.