History’s Child

It’s a chilly November evening in the South Korean city of Kwangju, and a mostly middle-aged group — the men in baseball caps, the women with perms — are at the train station awaiting their idol: 60-year-old presidential contender Park Geun-hye. Suddenly, the unmistakable riff of “Gangnam Style” throbs through the twilight. Wearing the crimson of Park’s ruling Saenuri Party, four young women in short shorts, knee-highs and cropped jackets bound across the platform. As they perform the riding and lassoing moves of the song’s trademark dance, many in the crowd look stunned, as if they have never viewed the most watched video on YouTube or heard the song that has become globally synonymous with South Korea.

The spectacle at the station was the opening act for Park’s Kwangju campaign stop, but it seemed out of sync with the occasion. “Gangnam Style” reflects a young, exuberant and irreverent South Korea. Park’s supporters — older and conservative in outlook — don’t quite fit that picture. Neither, for that matter, does Park. On the hustings, while she bows politely and graciously shakes hands with long lines of well-wishers, she comes across as earnest and stoic. At rallies and press conferences, she tends to stick to script. Cold, not cool, say her critics, who, perhaps unfairly, call her the “ice queen.”

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Park should be comfortable with people. As the eldest child of Park Chung-hee, the strongman who ruled South Korea for 18 years, she has long been in the public eye. Polls have her holding a narrow but stubborn lead over her main rival, 59-year-old Moon Jae-in. Moon was a student activist and later a human-rights lawyer, and he belongs to the left-leaning, opposition Democratic United Party, so younger voters in particular see him as a liberal who could challenge the Establishment. Though the front runner, Park seems aware that she needs to jazz up her image and broaden her appeal beyond the older set — to get some Gangnam style of her own. In Kwangju she starts her speech with an entreaty: “Help me start a new era.”

South Korea will start a new era in at least one respect should Park win the Dec. 19 election. In a land dominated by gray men in dark suits, a Park presidency would be the first time a woman has occupied the highest office. (South Korea ranked 108th in the World Economic Forum’s 2012 gender-gap rankings — sandwiched between the United Arab Emirates at 107 and Kuwait at 109.) Even if Park loses, her nation’s history will record her as the first female contender for President.

Park is also trying to change her party. Saenuri is identified with Big Business and the Establishment; Park wants to recast the party as the champion of the reforms that many South Koreans feel the country needs, even if some conservatives resist. In recent weeks she has struck a populist tone, promising to stick up for small-business owners and low-income families. Some think she is undergoing a makeover simply to be elected. “Her longtime identity as a conservative candidate and her new identity as a candidate of change are clashing,” says Jeong Han-wool, a public-opinion expert at the Seoul-based East Asia Institute. But Park vows she is for real. In written responses to TIME, she says, “If a politician makes a promise, it should be kept.”

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The Ballad of South Korea
It matters who leads South Korea. In the 1960s, Park’s father pioneered one of history’s great economic turnarounds, picking industries to export the country out of poverty. The model was adopted by other Asian nations, leading to the region’s economic miracle. Today, South Korea is the world’s 11th biggest economy; real GDP growth, according to HSBC research, is projected to be 3.8% in 2013 — not superlative, but a figure most Western countries would envy. The politics are vigorous, as are South Korea’s top companies, which have a global footprint. When it comes to soft power — from Samsung phones to glossy K-pop — South Korea has supplanted Japan as East Asia’s leading force.

But South Korea also has entrenched problems, both geopolitical and domestic. Externally, the country, which hosts U.S. military bases, isn’t in a friendly neighborhood. It’s surrounded by rogue state North Korea (apparently planning yet another rocket launch), old enemy Japan, with which it’s locked in a bitter dispute over the sovereignty of a few islets, and the dragon in the room, China, a big market but also a big rival for resources and influence. Internally, the economy needs to be weaned off its overreliance on a handful of conglomerates or chaebol, whose internal businesses feed one another. South Koreans can easily wake up in an apartment built by a Samsung subsidiary, check their schedules on a Samsung phone or tablet, throw on a Samsung jacket and drive a Renault Samsung car to the Samsung Medical Center.

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Individually, many South Koreans are badly stressed from too much work. An intensely materialistic lifestyle — mocked by “Gangnam Style” — has contributed to household debt climbing to 154% of disposable income, and though the income gap is widening, among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development members, South Korea spends the least on welfare. The education system is among the world’s most brutally competitive, and within the OECD, South Korea’s suicide rate is the highest. Calls are growing for a more equitable society. “A country that has reached Korea’s level of growth has to raise the quality of life of its citizens,” says Seoul’s mayor, Park Won-soon (no relation to Park Geun-hye). “We are in a situation that requires us to come up with creative, new ideas and to experiment.”

Then there’s Park’s background. While her father, a general who seized power in a 1961 military coup, is revered by many South Koreans, particularly older folk, as a hero, he is also despised for flagrant abuses during his authoritarian rule. So outsize was his power and influence that his legacy remains the prism through which contemporary politics is viewed. Park Geun-hye’s political pedigree, thus, is as much curse as blessing — it benefits yet also tarnishes her. To be a figure of unity she will have to overcome her history. “I know that the moniker of a ‘President’s daughter’ will always be with me,” she tells TIME. “[But] I know more than anyone the divergent views about my father. I want to be judged on my own merits.”

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Shadows of the Past
Seoul’s Park Chung Hee presidential Library & Museum is ground zero for Park family lore. The sprawling complex is a tribute in glass and stone to a man and the transformation he wrought. In the lobby hangs a story-high portrait of the former dictator. Exhibits extol his rural-development schemes and water-management techniques. One case displays simply the scissors he used to cut ribbons at the openings of factories, dams and roads.

On a recent afternoon, the halls were nearly empty, save for a few elderly men shuffling about. Over soy milk at the gift shop, 80-year-old Woo Jae-young declares that Park Chung-hee is his hero. Born when the Korean Peninsula was a colony of Japan, Woo survived both the Korean War and the hungry years before Park’s assumption of power. Such is his enthusiasm for Park that he buys TIME a small, framed portrait of the dictator to keep as a memento, and says he will vote for Park Geun-hye: “She was educated by a good father, so she will be a good President.”

There’s no guarantee of that, of course. But what’s clear is that Park was forced to grow up fast. She was studying in Paris when her mother Yuk Young-soo was killed in a failed assassination attempt on her father. On the morning of Aug. 15, 1974, on South Korea’s independence day, Park Chung-hee was speaking before a packed house at Seoul’s National Theater when Mun Se-gwang, a sympathizer of North Korea, opened fire. The first shot missed its mark; the second hit the First Lady, who died later that day.

The story of Park Chung-hee’s reaction to the fatal shooting of his wife has become the stuff of legend. As she was carried off the stage, he returned to the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I will continue my speech.” These days, the tale is invariably told as a preface to an anecdote about his daughter, who, when told of her father’s 1979 assassination, thought of her country first. “Is the border secure?” she reportedly asked, referring to possible North Korean incursions. Says Cho Gab-je, a conservative pundit and writer: “We have an expression, ‘to have a big liver’ — it’s having guts. This is a quality both have.” Her mother’s death made Park Geun-hye, just 22 then, the de facto First Lady, hosting foreign dignitaries, including U.S. President Gerald Ford, and representing the First Family at events — a role that earned her much goodwill at home.

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But being a dictator’s daughter exacts a psychic toll. Her father — who was shot dead at a dinner by his own intelligence chief for reasons still unclear — made development his top priority. (“In human life, economics precedes politics and culture,” he famously wrote.) As South Korea’s economy strengthened, he tightened his hold on the country. Up till the late 1970s, thousands of opposition figures were arrested, and sometimes tortured, under draconian security regulations. In a recent speech, Park’s challenger Moon, who was jailed by Park Sr.’s regime for his activism, recalled that “it was a world where tanks would be running around campus, and schools were forced to shut down for months.” Despite violent crackdowns by Park and his autocratic successors, also military men, the struggle for liberty persisted until 1987, when the country held its first free and fair presidential election in decades.

After her father’s assassination, Park retreated from the spotlight, living in relative seclusion. Eventually she returned to political life. In 1998 she became a legislator, being re-elected four times. While she was on the campaign trail in 2006, an ex-convict lunged from the crowd and slashed her with a box cutter. Television footage showed Park calmly trying to stanch the bleeding from the 10-cm gash to her right cheek. A recent TV spot turns her still visible scar into a metaphor for sacrifice and national healing. “The wound inflicted that day … changed me completely,” she narrates. “Since then I have decided to dedicate the rest of my life tending to your wounds.”

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In 2007, Park sought the conservative camp’s presidential nomination but lost to Lee Myung-bak, the outgoing incumbent. (South Korean Presidents serve single five-year terms.) Lee, a former construction CEO, was popular when he was elected; citizens figured that as a former business boss he would be decisive. But his time in office has proved humdrum, and the latter stage of his tenure has been tarnished by corruption scandals involving his relatives and aides. In a recent report, moreover, Amnesty International accused the Lee government of expanding the use of the National Security Law to suppress free speech. In February, Park helped rebrand Lee’s besieged Grand National Party as Saenuri, meaning “New Frontier.” She then led it to an unexpected victory in the April parliamentary polls.

Today, Park stands to gain from South Korea’s young democracy by winning the highest office in the land through the vote instead of the gun, as her father did. Yet for years she would not criticize him, saying only that “history and the people” would judge his record. In September, as public pressure mounted and her poll numbers slid, she modified her message, but without condemning him outright. “In the shadows of South Korea’s rapid growth, there was pain, suffering and irregularities as well as various human-rights abuses committed by authorities,” she said in a televised address. “I deeply apologize to all those who were personally hurt and family members of victims of government abuse.” Her statement satisfied few. Some conservatives accused her of caving to political pressure, besmirching her father’s name to score political points. Others questioned her sincerity. “The people are not holding her responsible for the sins of her father but asking about her interpretation of history,” says Yu Chang-seon, a liberal writer and pundit. “She has a duty to answer.”

Generation Gap
History weighs less heavily on younger South Koreans who, born into relative affluence, are more concerned with the country’s democratic future than its authoritarian past. Words like duty do little for Kim Ou-joon, 43, the host of what — at a reported 10 million downloads — is one of South Korea’s most popular podcasts. Kim specializes in quasi-journalistic, quasi-comedic takedowns of Seoul’s conservative establishment, especially departing President Lee. This election, he says, is about holding government to account and addressing the concerns and struggles of ordinary people. He is mystified by the older generation’s romantic view of the Parks. “Park Geun-hye talks about the future,” he says, “but she doesn’t represent it.”

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Like a growing number of his compatriots, Kim believes the economic model that profited South Korea for so long needs an overhaul. Onetime independent presidential candidate Ahn Cheol-soo — a 50-year-old doctor and entrepreneur who dropped out of the race so as to not split the liberal vote with Moon and hand victory to Park — spoke for many fellow citizens in a recent speech. South Korea, he said, was “where children suffer miserably in the fierce competition to enter prestigious universities; where young people cannot find jobs; where parents must tighten their belts more than ever to pay their mortgage and support their children’s education.” He described the country as “increasingly anxious, lonely and unsure about the future.”

This national malaise has doubtless stirred Park’s leftward turn. She is promising to “restore [the] middle class” by addressing bread-and-butter issues like household debt and child care. Both camps are pledging to decentralize the economy, but Moon wants more sweeping reforms. South Korea’s corporate titans enjoy “unfair privileges,” he has said, calling for stronger antitrust laws to protect small and medium-size enterprises.

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Indeed, while South Koreans are rightly proud of their world-class brands, especially those in the field of consumer electronics, there’s a growing acknowledgment that individual entrepreneurs need help. Been Kim, 30, was a mobile-phone designer for an established South Korean outfit for eight years. The environment, says Kim, was “rigid” and “patriarchal,” so she left to start her own design firm Beeeen & Co. Breaking out proved hard. The process of setting up a company was so cumbersome and expensive that she opted to incorporate in business-friendly Hong Kong. And when she realized that male factory managers in South Korea weren’t taking her seriously — putting other, bigger, chaebol-linked orders first — she moved production to China. “Korean bosses treated me like a daughter,” she says. “In China they treat me like a chairman; they respect what I do.”

Odd Woman Out
Park’s campaign itself takes place in a man’s world. A day on the election trail with her is a whirl of middle-aged men, punctuated by the occasional female journalist or staffer. Her supporters, particularly older men, see her as a “dutiful” daughter (the female counterpart of the filial son). The media like to mention that she is single and childless. When analysts say she is “strong” or “tough,” they invariably add “for a woman.” Park isn’t averse to a little gender stereotyping herself, promising “motherly, female leadership” should she be elected.

South Korea’s gender indicators aren’t good. There’s no shortage of accomplished female graduates, but many drop out of the workforce early, due in part to a macho business culture that marginalizes them. Women with jobs earn on average 39% less than men and are overrepresented among contract laborers toiling with low pay and no benefits. Park has promised to support working women — and increase the country’s low birth rate — by fighting workplace discrimination, increasing child-care benefits and supporting single-parent families. “Women can not only succeed as vibrant social leaders but simultaneously as nurturing mothers,” she tells TIME. Park’s critics say her concern about women’s welfare is too little too late. Says labor advocate Jini Park (no relation): “She is playing [an election] trump card.”

Whether out of expedience, ideology or epiphany, both Park and Moon are presenting themselves as change agents. First, though, they must deal with their own burdens of history. “I know how fleeting and, at times, harrowing, political power can be,” Park tells TIME. Moon, for his part, served as chief of staff to his lawyer friend, onetime President Roh Moo-hyun. Roh rose from humble farming origins to be elected on platforms of freedom and open and clean government. But when his family later became mired in corruption allegations, he leaped to his death from a hill behind his house. For front runner Park — and also, though to a lesser extent, Moon — to win, much of the electorate has to be ready to forgive or forget the past. Perhaps then, South Korea will forge a new future.

— with reporting by Audrey Yoo / Kwangju and Seoul

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