DMZ Summit Lifts South Korea's Moon to Seven-Month Polling High

(Bloomberg) -- Support for South Korea's president jumped to a seven-month high after he stood with U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the border between the two Koreas, bolstering his prospects for parliamentary elections in April.

South Korean leader Moon Jae-in's support jumped 4.8 percentage points from a week ago to 52.4%, according a Realmeter tracking poll released Thursday. Moon had seen support for his government plumb new depths a few months ago as U.S.-North Korea nuclear talks sputtered and South Korea's gross domestic product shrank the most in a decade.

In another bit of welcome news for Moon -- a progressive who has staked his political capital on bridging differences between Trump and Kim -- support for his main conservative opposition, the Liberty Party Korea, slid to a four-month low, according to the tracking poll conducted from Monday to Wednesday.

Keeping Up With Plot of the Trump-Kim Nuclear Show

Moon hailed Sunday the Trump-Kim summit in the Demilitarized Zone buffer dividing the peninsula as a milestone for peace. At the hastily arranged meeting, Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to set foot in North Korea and his almost hour-long discussions with Kim led to an agreement to resume nuclear disarmament talks that had stalled since their last summit collapsed in February.

South Korea's Soaring Minimum Wage Runs Into Strong Headwinds

Moon has faced heat over his signature policy to raise the minimum wage, which has been blamed for increasing unemployment rather than raising incomes.

To contact the reporter on this story: Shinhye Kang in Seoul at skang24@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Scott at bscott66@bloomberg.net, Jon Herskovitz

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