★동시통역사 & 외국어사랑방★--국내 최대/최강 통번역사 카페

<A href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2012/12/south-koreas-presidential-election/print">http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2012/12/south-koreas-presidential-election/print</A>   <H1 class=ec-blog-fly-title>South Korea's presidential election</H1> <H3 class=ec-blog-headline>A homecoming </H3> Dec 19th 2012, 22:50 by D.T. | SEOUL    <DIV class=ec-blog-body> SOUTH KOREA has elected Park Geun-hye, a 60-year-old conservative, as president for the coming five years. The candidate is from the same party, the Saenuri party, as the incumbent, Lee Myung-bak. She is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the dictator who set South Korea on the path of break-neck development, seizing power in 1961 and assassinated by his security services in 1979. Ms Park thus becomes South Korea’s first woman president. Curiously, she also has the distinction of having once been the country’s first lady, following the assassination of her mother in 1974 by a North Korea sympathiser. Having grown up in the Blue House, South Korea's presidential mansion, she now returns there. Ms Park defeated the main liberal candidate, Moon Jae-in of the Democratic United Party (DUP), by 51.6% to 48%, following a tight contest that had everyone guessing until the end. Turnout was nearly 76%, despite bone-chilling weather. Such a high figure was expected to favour Mr Moon, since he had support among the young, who tend to drag their feet on the way to the polls. After her victory Ms Park spoke in Gwanghwamun, near the main royal palace in Seoul and in front of a statue of the 15th-century Confucian, King Sejong. She called her win a "victory brought by the people's hope". Mr Moon has congratulated Ms Park, and apologised to his supporters for not being able to "keep his promise". As much as anything, the election was a battle of the generations. Those in their 20s and 30s fell behind Mr Moon, while those in their 50s and older—a growing segment in a fast-aging country—overwhelmingly chose Ms Park. In Gwanghwamun, older voters were in party spirit, dancing and chanting her name. They are more likely to look back with nostalgia on the rule of her strongman father and his era of rapid growth and full employment. This worked in Ms Park's favour today. In the Hongdae student district, by contrast, 20-somethings had tears in their eyes. But they were outnumbered: for the first time in a presidential election, more voters were above 50 than under 40. For all that each candidate appealed to different groups, both campaigned chiefly on the issue of what came to be called, in regrettably clumsy parlance, "economic democratisation". It meant reining in the power of the influential families that control the handful of South Korea’s dominant conglomerates, known as chaebol. And it meant increasing the security, for instance, through welfare spending, of those left behind now that the era of development-at-all-costs is ending. The Saenuri Party has historically been firmly behind the chaebol, so Ms Park’s tack to the centre had alarmed the party’s core supporters. But the strategy first proved successful in elections for the National Assembly last April, and then again today. Her instincts will now be to tack back to the right. But she will be closely watched to see how she deals with such problems as overly cosy arrangements among conglomerate affiliates, as well South Korea's growing number of irregular workers, many of them youngsters, who were hired without full employment rights. As for foreign policy, South Korea’s alliance with America will be reaffirmed. Ms Park will have few warm and fuzzy feelings for China, but she will acknowledge its importance as South Korea's main trading partner. She will persist with the country’s pursuit of free-trade agreements after Mr Lee leaves the Blue House in February. The president-elect inherits troubled relations with Japan, given friction over the Dokdo islets (known in Japan as Takeshima) and the historical issue of wartime sexual enslavement of Korean women. The emphatic general-election victory in Japan on December 16th for the conservative Liberal Democratic Party and its leader, Shinzo Abe, who denies Japanese wartime atrocities, will not, on the face things, help. On the other hand, Ms Park’s father, like so many Koreans of the post-war order, had during the Japanese occupation been a collaborator, an officer in the Japanese imperial army. Ms Park would do the country a favour by pointing out that matters of history need to be faced honestly by all sides. As for the country’s relations with North Korea, these have been essentially frozen since Lee Myung-bak made clear that he was not going to be blackmailed by a dictatorship that set off nuclear devices, launched rockets and sank a South Korean naval vessel. Ms Park is in no danger of going so far as her liberal opponent, Mr Moon, who appeared to want a return to the “sunshine policy” of a decade ago; it served the North well in terms of oodles of aid with few strings. But she is certainly readier than Mr Lee to seek an opening. She will, she says with not much precision, “reach a balance between hard-line and overly dovish stances" towards the North. She appears unlikely to make many unconditional gestures. For the Democratic United Party, today's result is a blow. Mr Moon’s campaign had insufficient time to recover from the challenge of Ahn Cheol-soo, a centre-left political outsider who set the race on fire but who threatened to split the liberal vote and who stepped down in favour of Mr Moon only in November. He then took time to throw his support behind Mr Moon. The election was fought chiefly over issues of economic inequality. That ought to have been classic DUP ground. There will now be much soul-searching on the political left.    </DIV>