SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea's president-elect, Park Geun-hye, called for national reconciliationon Thursday and met with foreign envoys in Seoul, a day after she was elected the country's first female leader in a close contest that reflected generational and regional divides and growing unease over North Korea's military threat.
Ms. Park, 60, the daughter of South Korea's longest-ruling dictator, won 51.6 percent of the votes cast on Wednesday to choose a successor to President Lee Myung-bak, who was barred by law from seeking a second term.
"I will reflect various opinions of the people, whether they have supported or opposed me," Ms. Park said in a speech Thursday. She pledged "impartiality," "national harmony" and "reconciliation," saying she would bring people into her government "regardless of their regional background, gender and generation."
She also promised "the sharing of fruits of economic growth," mindful of doubts that her conservative party, the governing Saenuri Party, would address the widening income gap that was one of the biggest issues in the campaign.
Ms. Park on Wednesday became the first presidential candidate to win a majority of the vote since South Korea adopted a democratic constitution in 1987. But the campaign hardly put the country's divisions to rest. It rekindled a dispute over the legacy of Ms. Park's father, Park Chung-hee, who remains a polarizing figure 33 years after his iron-fisted rule ended with his assassination in 1979. It also highlighted a generational divide over issues such as North Korea and the powerful, family-controlled business conglomerates known as chaebol. Exit polls indicated that Ms. Park won twice as many votes among people 50 and older than did her main rival, Moon Jae-in, but only half as many among voters in their 20s and 30s.
She defeated Mr. Moon in most provinces and big cities. But Seoul and the southwestern provinces of North and South Jeolla, traditionally a progressive stronghold, chose the liberal Mr. Moon, who championed bold economic investment in North Korea as a means of inducing denuclearization and more aggressive measures to tame the conglomerates, which have been widely blamed for growing economic inequality. Mr. Moon won 48 percent of the vote nationwide.
Ms. Park met Thursday with the ambassadors from the United States, China, Japan and Russia, the four other countries involved with the two Koreas in talks over the North's nuclear weapons programs. The meetings reflected the sensitive timing of her election — she is to be inaugurated in February, not long after President Obama begins his second term in Washington. South Korea fears that Japan will form an increasingly nationalist cabinet following its parliamentary election last Sunday. Seoul has also grown increasingly concerned about how to position itself between its traditional ally the United States and a rising China.
Mr. Obama said he would work closely with Ms. Park. Japan's prime-minister-in-waiting, Shinzo Abe, said Thursday that he would seek close communication with her, according to Japan's Kyodo news agency. The three leaders' most urgent joint task is how to deal with North Korea's expanding nuclear and missile programs, as demonstrated by its launch of a long-range rocket last week. Ms. Park on Thursday referred to the launch as "a symbolic demonstration of how serious a challenge we face in national security,"
"North Korea will wait a few months to see if Park Geun-hye will appease it with money," said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea specialist at Kookmin University in Seoul. "If she does not — and it looks unlikely that she will, given her statements so far and the hard-liners surrounding her — then North Korea will launch provocations."
With Ms. Park's election, South Korea extended the tenure of its staunchly pro-American governing party and handed power to the first woman to win the post in a deeply patriarchal part of Asia. Voters appeared to prefer stability over Mr. Moon's calls for radical change.
"This is a victory for the people's wish to overcome crises and revive the economy," Ms. Park told her cheering supporters after the results came in, a crowd that had gathered in freezing weather in downtown Seoul to celebrate a woman whose steeliness in the face of adversity is legend. According to her memoir, when told of her father's assassination in 1979, she responded, "Is everything all right along the border with North Korea?"
In its starkest terms, this election was about South Korea's continuing confrontation with its authoritarian past, and confusion over whether a conservative or liberal approach would best serve the country as it tries to stop North Korea's excesses and to handle growing frustration over economic inequality without derailing the country's economic miracle. Mr. Moon, a former human rights lawyer who was once imprisoned for opposing the authoritarian rule of Ms. Park's father, campaigned on restoring key liberal policies from the early 2000s, including a warm embrace of North Korea as a way of trying to curb its aggression.
While Ms. Park's run for president was pioneering in one important way, because of her gender, few see her win as likely to significantly change the lot of women anytime soon in a traditional society where, despite some strong inroads in business and government, women's most important job is still considered to be raising children. In an assessment echoed by voters, analysts said the clearest indication that little was changing was that Ms. Park won in good part on the appeal that a man — her father — still holds for many in a country still deeply divided over his legacy.
"Her election was less to do with her gender and more to do with the fact that she was her father's daughter," said Kim Ji-yoon, research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. Her father's rule is remembered by many with bitterness; his government jailed and tortured many dissidents — whom he painted as Communist sympathizers helping North Korea — and even banned rock music and miniskirts.
But he is consistently voted the most popular former president in polls for his role in birthing the vibrant South Korean economy, a rapid rise from the ruins of the Korean War that has built a thriving middle class, made South Korean companies feared competitors and restored the nation's dignity.
Still, Ms. Park will have to contend with the fallout from that success, and her father's role in it. One of the abiding themes of the campaign was the clamor for more economic equality and a reining in of the conglomerates like Samsung that Mr. Park helped build with government largess. Those companies power the economy, but their unruly expansion in recent years is blamed for aggravating the gap between rich and poor.
In the end, South Koreans appeared to prefer Ms. Park's calls to overhaul the chaebol over time to the more aggressive approach suggested by her rival, Mr. Moon. Indeed, what appeared to separate the two candidates throughout the election was how far they would go in implementing change.
Mr. Moon campaigned on a return to the Sunshine Policy, a combination of investments and aid to the North. Although Ms. Park criticized the "inflexible" hard-line policy of the incumbent, President Lee Myung-bak, for failing to tame North Korea, she prefers a cautious rapprochement. She said she would decouple humanitarian aid from politics and try to meet the new North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. But she insisted, like Mr. Lee, that any large-scale investments be conditional on progress in ending North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
While Ms. Park's stance may pose something of a challenge to the Obama administration's policy on North Korea — which had been in lock step with Mr. Lee's — analysts say it will be much easier for the United States to work with her on the issue than with Mr. Moon.
On Wednesday, President Obama congratulated Ms. Park in a statement, while noting "admiration for all President Lee has done to strengthen relations" between the United States and South Korea.
Ms. Park's political career was born in family tragedy. Her mother was killed by a Communist agent in 1974 when Ms. Park was 22 and a student in Paris; she abandoned her studies to return to Seoul and serve as acting first lady. Five years later, her father was killed by his disgruntled spy chief.
Ms. Park retired from public view, as the country eventually turned from authoritarianism in the late 1980s, with many vilifying her father as a dictator. She returned to political life only in 1998 with a vow to "save the country," which was struggling with the Asian financial crisis. Voters who remembered her father's charismatic leadership elected her to a seat in Parliament by a landslide margin, and she has held on to that seat ever since, building a reputation as a principled and tough-minded leader.
"Her image among her supporters is a stable leader, calm during crises, strong and dependable," said Choi Jin, head of the Institute of Presidential Leadership.
Throughout the campaign, Ms. Park, who never married, said that her gender would be an asset in leading the nation in difficult times. "I have no family to take care of," she said. "I have no child to inherit my properties. You, the people, are my only family, and to make you happy is the reason I do politics."
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