Adoptee becomes first Korean to reach French Senate

A South Korean adoptee won a seat in the French Senate in the country's parliamentary election on Sunday, becoming the first ethnic Korean to advance to France's top political body. ean-Vincent Place, 43, who was adopted by a French family in the 1970s and grew to become a politician, was elected as a French senator after running in a constituency of the province of Ile de France on the leftist Green Party ticket. Born in Seoul in 1968, Place was adopted by a French lawmaker and his wife at the age of seven and became a naturalized French citizen two years later. He majored in economics in college, and began his career as a financial auditor. After entering politics as a liberal in 1993, Place joined the Green Party in 2001, and once took the post of its assistant secretary general. Since 2005, he has been representing the province of Ile de France, which encompasses Paris, and currently serves as an assistant director of the provincial assembly's transportation committee. Less than a month prior to Sunday's election, Place was embroiled in a racist controversy as Alain Marleix, a lawmaker of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative Union for a Popular Movement, accused him of being a "Korean national" and warned him of "paying a price," prompting the then-leading candidate to consider a lawsuit in response, according to local media reports. After winning the seat, Place was quoted by local media as saying that he was satisfied with the election results in which left-wing lawmakers took the majority of 348 seats in the upper house of the parliament for the first time in more than 50 years. Place, along with other newly elected senators, has a six-year mandate which begins next month.