By the end of the year, Park Geun-hye might become a familiar name in world politics. The daughter of former President Park Chung-hee swept her Saenuri party to an unexpectedly comfortable General Assembly election triumph last month, and now stands on the verge of being elected South Korea’s first female president.
The woman known affectionately as the ‘Queen of Elections’ is now the front-runner in the presidential poll later this year, when the unpopular Lee Myung-bak steps aside. Speculation of a possible presidential bid is not news in South Korea, but the manner in which she led an increasingly unpopular ruling party to victory has made her the leading candidate.
Opinion polls in the lead up to the 11 April election indicated a tough battle for Saenuri (New Frontier), who have been through tough times as of late. In February they changed their name from the Grand National Party and spent most of the campaign distancing themselves from Lee’s presidency.
Saenuri won 152 seats, shedding 14 from their 2008 total, but such was closeness of the race that the 25-seat victory over their nearest rival, the Democratic United Party, was considered a major surprise.
Such was the weight of expectation on a closer battle that the DUP’s secretary-general Park Sun-sook apologised to her supporters for failing to “turn public calls for punishing the ruling party into reality”. President Lee, meanwhile, congratulated the people on their “wise decision” to keep the status quo.
The election itself was the latest example of internal South Korean political squabbles. Gwangju city and its surrounding province, as I’ve written about previously, had 30 seats in 300-seat National Assembly up for grabs. The ruling Saenuri party won none of those seats. In fact, Saenuri also struggled badly in Seoul, and vast swathes of the western seaboard turned turned yellow for the Democratic United Party.
Continuing regional squabbles has angered many newspapers here, with their editiorials seeking to end the current malaise in national politics. But for non-Koreans, the disjointed nature of local politics here is both intriguing and baffling. Voters were apparently turned by indecisive opposition parties who failed to properly agree on candidates, and also domestic issues such as growing income gaps and inflation. North Korea was less important than many outsiders might have thought.
For Park Gyun-hye, 11 April was a triumph. She was appointed de facto leader of Saenuri late last year in response to plummeting approval ratings, and immediately used it build support for a potential presidential bid. (Park previously lost out to Lee Myung-bak for the Grand National Party’s nomination for president in 2007.)
Yet she is not without controversy or criticism. Her father, the dictator Park Chung-hee, was assassinated in 1979 by his Korea Central Intelligence Agency director Kim Jae-kyu. Kim claimed Park was an obstacle to democracy and his actions were out of patriotism.
Park Chung-hee is still widely revered by many for his role in turning South Korea into the industrial giant it is today, but critics point to nearly 20 years of dictatorship where freedoms of speech and press were curtailed. Park Gyun-hee has often been labelled “the dictator’s daughter” by her left wing rivals.
The election of the future president of South Korea should be an important worldwide event. After all, the country is one of the G-20 major economies, and just an hour north of its capital city lies the world’s most heavily fortified border. Recent visits by Barack Obama to the peninsula, and more recently the North Koreans testing their missile capabilities, has placed this otherwise small country at the forefront of world news.
Remember the name Park Geun-hye, because in December 2012 she might be the first woman President of South Korea.
Andrew Farrell works as an English language teacher in Korea.
