By MARTIN FACKLER
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, or New Frontier, Party, 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.
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. 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.
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.”
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