In a Rowdy Democracy,
a Dictator’s Daughter With an Unsoiled Aura
GONGJU, South Korea
WHEN Park Geun-hye, a small woman of regal bearing, stepped
off the dais to shake hands after a campaign speech at an outdoor market here,
some in the crowd, mostly older people, surged toward the center of the throng.
To them, it seemed, Ms. Park was not so much the leader of a scandal-tainted
conservative political party that was then lagging in the polls, but more like
a movie celebrity, or even a religious figure.
“I touched her hand, I touched her hand!” shouted one man,
Lee Kyung-su, 72, a retired engineer.
Later, in a calmer moment, he tried to explain why she
elicited such strong emotions. “She lives alone, doesn’t have selfish desires
and has no family to corrupt her,” he said. “She has given herself to her
country.”
Even in South Korea’s feisty and competitive brand of
democracy, which has produced its share of strong personalities and charismatic
leaders, Ms. Park holds a special
status. The strong-willed daughter of a slain dictator, an
unmarried woman seeking power in a firmly patriarchal society, a critic
of social inequality in a party beholden to big business, Ms. Park, 60, can
often seem larger than life despite her small stature and quiet demeanor.
Now, after having succeeded in leading her revamped Saenuri Party,
or New Frontier, the successor to the governing Grand National Party, to a surprisingly strong showing in parliamentary
elections last week, she also stands a good chance of becoming the country’s
next president. That would make her the first woman to be the democratically
elected leader of a nation in this economically vibrant but male-dominated part
of Asia.
“She is part Bismarck and part Evita,” said Ahn Byong-jin,
author of “The Park Geun-hye Phenomenon.” “She wants to be like her father
by being a strong leader who looks out for her people, but she also
tries to be a woman who is sympathetic to the people’s problems.”
It is a remarkable rise, even if she had the advantage of
being schooled in politics from an early age by one of South Korea’s most
accomplished leaders: her father, Park Chung-hee, a general who ruled the
country with an iron fist for 18 years but also laid the foundation for one of Asia’s great economic
success stories. After Ms. Park’s
mother was killed in 1974 during a botched assassination attempt on Mr. Park,
he summoned his daughter, then 22, back from graduate school in France.
(DO- 18 yr long brutal dictatorship + lift Korea from its
poverty + lay out foundation for economic success)
FOR the next five years she stood at his side, hosting world
leaders and fulfilling the public duties of a first lady, until he was killed
by his spy chief in 1979. Over those years, she said, she got her first lessons
in politics from her father during conversations in the back seat of his
limousine.
“My father’s biggest achievement was to motivate the South
Korean people, to show them we could become prosperous if we worked hard,” she
said in an interview last year. “He taught me to love my country, and serve my
country.”
For Ms. Park, her father’s legacy is at once the
source of her popularity but also a limiting factor, tying her down
to older ways of thinking that she is trying to move past.
(the source of her popularity à. ) Conservatives see in her their nostalgic
hopes for regaining the sense of shared national purpose that flourished
under her father, and for returning to a more innocent time, before money began
to corrupt the political system.
(limiting factor à. ) To the left, though, she is tainted by her
connection to one of the brutal military autocrats who imprisoned or killed
political opponents before South Korea became a democracy in the late 1980s.
Ms. Park has criticized the human rights abuses during her father’s regime,
while emphasizing his record as a patriot who lifted his nation from the poverty
that followed the Korean War.
Ms. Park has sought to play up her clean image by distancing
herself from President Lee Myung-bak, the former head of a major construction company, who has
been hurt by money-related scandals. Earlier this year, she led an emergency
committee to revive her Grand National Party by renaming it Saenuri. She
has also moved it to the left with a new platform of more robust welfare
programs to appeal to voters fed up with the nation’s jobless recovery after
the global financial crisis.
However, to hear her and many others here tell it, her main appeal is not
her policies, but her character. Before the parliamentary elections
last week, she impressed voters with her tireless campaigning, shaking hands
until she had to wrap one wrist in a thick white bandage. After it was over,
she said her track record of keeping promises had carried the day.
“I think the people’s trust that we will keep our promises no
matter what is what led to this election result,” she said in an e-mail last
Saturday.
Since becoming a lawmaker more than a decade ago, she has
tried to keep herself from being soiled by politics, including the
occasional brawls in Parliament. But one result is that she is often seen
as being aristocratic and aloof, an image reinforced when one of her former
aides publicly complained of being forced to hold the hood of Ms. Park’s
raincoat over her head.
Ms. Park also says very little in public about one of the
most pioneering aspects of her political career, her gender. Analysts say her
ties to her father have helped her break through the glass ceiling in
this still strongly Confucian society. Indeed, she enjoys an almost
saintlike aura among some of her followers as a woman who gave everything for
her nation, losing both her father and her mother, and then forwent marriage
and children.
AS she spoke in Gongju on a recent morning, women who
listened said her gender was one of her biggest appeals.
“I’d like to see for once how a woman would do as president,”
said Lee Myung-shil, 37, a homemaker.
Ms. Park’s supporters on the street seemed to be split evenly
between women and older men. The latter said they did not mind that she was a
woman, but added bluntly that they supported her because of her father.
“He saved us from hunger and put clothes on our backs,” said
Im Hong-su, 74, a retired bus driver.
But her father’s legacy has overshadowed her efforts to
reach beyond her party, particularly to the younger voters who might
hold the key to the next presidential election, in December. Younger voters
have little interest in or knowledge of her father, instead wondering what she
will do for them, analysts say.
“Younger voters wonder why they should vote for a dictator’s
daughter,” said Park Tae-gyun, a professor of Korea studies at Seoul National
University.
While Ms. Park has yet to declare her candidacy, she has
tried to create a softer image for herself and her party, as more sympathetic
to the plight of job-hungry younger Koreans. But this has not proved enough to
prevent the biggest threat to her presidential ambitions: the sudden emergence
of Ahn Cheol-soo, a doctor turned software entrepreneur whose outsider
status has struck a chord among young voters disillusioned with existing
political parties.
“She has until the election to show to young voters that she
really cares about helping us,” said Ko Min-hwan, 32, who owns a flooring shop
in Gongju. “Otherwise, we will just vote for Ahn.”
