1 / 10 South Korea: Huh Kyung-young

We don’t really have a particular politician like Donald Trump in South Korea. We once had an interesting politician -- more of a comical figure -- in our presidential election back in 2007. Huh Kyung-young, leader of his own Democratic Republican Party actually ran for president, and lost. He’s a bit of an odd one who once <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/20/us-korea-election-miracle-idUSTRE80J09X20120120" target="_blank">claimed to have an IQ of 430</a>. While campaigning he <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/20/us-korea-election-miracle-idUSTRE80J09X20120120" target="_blank">proclaimed</a>: "I can change 23 chromosomes and 40,000 DNA in the human body. If someone is diagnosed with uterine cancer, I can treat the cancer within 0.1 seconds just by looking into the patient's eyes." His campaign pledges were also quite crazy, like granting 100 million won to every single couple getting married. He also wanted to move the UN headquarters from NYC to DMZ (Korean Demilitarized Zone), in a town between North Korea and South Korea. Yes. He is that crazy. But he was oddly popular among Korean voters during the election; the press called it ‘Huh Kyung-young syndrome’. Of course he didn’t win the election but he earned nearly 100,000 votes, which is insanely huge. The driving reason behind his popularity was simple: people wanted to express their frustration with the country's politics. Huh was jailed in 2009 for 18 months on charges of defamation, after claiming Park Geun-hye, President of South Korea, would marry him. Today he is all but forgotten in Korean politics, but people still remember his name because he once was a symbol of the public's sarcastic response to South Korean politics. <em>-- Dohoon Kim, HuffPost Korea</em>

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