Park fights for her political survival

SOUTH Korea's Park Geun-hye, daughter of assassinated leader Park Chung-hee, is not only fighting for her ruling conservative party's survival, she is also putting her own presidential ambitions on the line.

Opinion polls show there has been a sharp swing to the left in Asia's fourth largest economy which this year chooses a new president and parliament — the first time in 20 years the two elections will be held in the same year.

The election will give an indication how Seoul will manage relations with its main ally, the US, and how it will handle the new North Korean leadership and its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Park's mother was also murdered — by a North Korean sympathiser — but she later met then-leader Kim Jong-il and says she favours a more flexible North Korea policy. She is likely to stick with the South's current proUS policy.

But the Grand National Party is in big trouble. In the words of one of its own lawmakers, the GNP is caught up in a "futile civil war" and is staring at a double defeat this year if it is not overhauled.

Analysts say that if anyone can save the GNP from ruin, it is Park, who as "queen of elections" has a track record of pulling off a string of victories as party leader.

Park says the GNP must "sever ties with the old ways and the misguided political practices of the past".

But she rejects any suggestion of abandoning the party's fundamental conservative credo. "It is, of course, necessary to tweak the basic principles that this party should be pursuing to follow the change of times," she told a party meeting in Seoul. "But at this point as we try to reform our policies, any more argument about 'conservatism' just isn't appropriate."

Always impeccably dressed and groomed, Park was back last week in her role as "chief campaign officer" donning white overalls to chat with cattle farmers — an important lobby group — and shovelling feed to their bovine charges. She later electrified activists in the town of Chuncheon, an hour northeast of the capital, who braved temperatures of minus 16 Celsius to catch a glimpse of her.

Park, whose father Park Chung-hee is remembered as a dictator-turned-hero of modernisation, now heads an emergency council which is trying to reinvent the crisis-hit party. She acknowledges the GNP has lost touch with ordinary voters.

Today, the party will have the first of a series of meetings to give it a makeover as it tries to woo young voters in the April parliamentary election. A string of older MPS have already quit or been asked not to run.

But criticism of her persists both within and outside the party. Last year, she was attacked for failing to rally behind the party in the early days of its crisis, and today detractors depict her as aloof, giving rise to the title "Ice Princess".

Park does retain the affection and sympathy of many of her countrymen for standing by her father as de facto "first lady" following the killing of her mother.

A year ago, she was the runaway leader to win December's presidential vote when Lee Myung-bak's mandatory single five-year term ends.

A series of corruption scandals and perceived policy blunders involving the GNP, coupled with the rapid rise in popularity of entrepreneurturned-university professor Ahn Seol-choo has opened the race. This, even though Ahn has expressed no intention or interest in running.