Park Ji-hyun (R), the 26-year-old co-head of the main opposition Democratic Party’s interim leadership committee, sits beside Lee Jun-seok, the chief of the ruling People Power Party, at the official banquet for the Seoul-Washington summit held at the National Museum of Korea in central Seoul on May 21, 2022. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, May 24 (Korea Bizwire) — Park Ji-hyun, the 26-year-old co-head of the main opposition Democratic Party’s (DP) interim leadership committee, said Tuesday that U.S. President Joe Biden wished her to be a “bigger politician.”
Park and Biden met during the state dinner that President Yoon Suk-yeol hosted at the National Museum of Korea for Biden after their summit talks on Saturday.
“He was really surprised when I told him I was 26 years old, joking I look younger … and he encouraged me to be a bigger politician,” Park said during a radio interview with CBS.
“We even took a selfie together with my phone,” she added.
The young DP leader entered politics in January as the head of the party’s special committee on eradicating digital sex crime after she came into the spotlight in 2020 for exposing the so-called Nth room case, an infamous Telegram sex crime case where dozens of women and girls were blackmailed into filming sexually exploitative materials.
In March, she became a co-head of the DP’s interim leadership committee.
Asked whether she will continue doing politics during the interview, Park said “yes,” noting she wants to be a politician who represents “the voice of social minorities.”
Park also said she will work hard to renovate the DP, which has been tied to a number of sexual misconduct cases involving its heavyweights in recent years, despite resistance from some of the party’s supporters.
Earlier this month, the DP emergency committee, led by Park, expelled Rep. Park Wan-joo over allegations he sexually harassed a female assistant last year.
(Yonhap)
