Dictator's daughter is first female president of South Korea

The daughter of South Korea's most notorious military dictator wrote a new chapter in the nation's history yesterday (Wednesday) when she became its first female president.

Park Geun-hye beat a strong opposition challenge driven by resentment of the family record to win the closest presidential race since South Korea embraced democracy in 1987.

Her opponent, Moon Jae-In, a former presidential aide, conceded defeat after a bitter campaign that boosted voter turnout to more than three quarters of the electorate, up from less than two thirds five years ago.

The 60-year-old new president is universally known as "Madame Park" and served as the first lady for her father, Park Chung-Hee, after her mother, Yuk Young-soo, was assassinated in 1974.

She served in parliament for two decades before being picked as presidential candidate of the Right-wing New Frontier Party.

Much of her core support derived from fond memories of the 18-year dictatorship of her father, under which the country's economy was transformed into the fourth largest in Asia.

South Korea's main challenges remain the fraught regional security and the uncertain destiny of North Korea, its pariah neighbour. As a Western ally, Seoul also faces the separate challenge of an expansionist China seeking to assert its role in Asia.

General Park is a polarising subject in a country where he ruthlessly quashed all dissent in the 1960s and 1970s. He was shot dead by his intelligence chief in 1979, five years after a North Korean assassin had missed his target but killed the dictator's wife.

Park, who once identified Queen Elizabeth I as her role model, launched her presidential bid as a paternalistic "National Happiness Campaign", but changed tack to reassure voters that democratic values were the pre-eminent principle of her politics.

In a country where corruption and the power of industrial conglomerates have dominated political fortunes, Park promised efforts to distribute wealth more equally. "I have no family to take care of and no children to pass wealth to. You, the people, are my family and your happiness is the reason that I stay in politics," she said.