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SEOUL, Dec 19: Ruling party candidate Roh Moo-hyun won South Korea’s presidential election on Thursday, a result that could complicate ties with the United States as the allies grapple with North Korea’s nuclear programme.
The unofficial count of 95 percent of ballots showed Roh beat conservative opposition candidate Lee Hoi-chang by 2.5 percentage points in a closely fought election that had become a referendum on how to handle South Korea’s unpredictable communist neighbour.
“I have failed again in my bid for the presidency,” said Lee, who lost the 1997 election to incumbent President Kim Dae-jung.
Roh thanked his supporters and vowed to work for every South Korean “not just those of you who backed me”.
Roh will have little time to savour his victory, facing a hostile parliament controlled by Lee’s party, a slowing economy and the Bush administration in Washington with a starkly different approach towards North Korea — branded part of an “axis of evil” along with Iraq and Iran — and its nuclear arms.
The National Election Commission was expected to formally confirm Roh as the winner early on Friday. The voter turnout at 70.2 percent was the lowest in South Korean history.
The triumph of Roh, 56, a populist human rights and labour lawyer, marks a stunning turnaround after the 11th-hour desertion of his election alliance partner, Chung Mong-joon.
Roh has vowed to be tough on the family-run conglomerates that dominate Asia’s fourth-largest economy, but continue President Kim’s “sunshine policy” of reconciliation with North Korea despite Pyongyang’s nuclear brinkmanship.
MARKETS SEEN POSITIVE: Prakash Sakpal, an economist with ING Barings in Hong Kong, said the projected ruling party win was “good news because Roh will continue the current government’s economic reform”.
“The markets are likely to react positively.”
But the Bush administration might be less enthused about Roh moving into the presidential Blue House, given his ambivalent statements in the past about the US military presence.
The United States has 37,000 troops helping protect the South from its reclusive neighbour. North and South Korea are technically still at war as the 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty.
But Roh’s campaign rode a tide of unprecedented anti-American sentiment that brought tens of thousands into the streets in anger after a US court martial acquitted two US soldiers whose armoured vehicle crushed to death two teenage girls during military exercises in June.
Robert Fouser, a Korea expert at Kyoto University in Japan, predicted a “German-style attempt to patch it up with the United States”, similar to moves by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who won re-election this year on an anti-US platform.
“Roh will need to reach out to the centre, so there will be a spin drive (on his stance towards the United States),” he said.
Korea University politics professor Lee Nae-young said anti-American sentiment contributed to Roh’s win but that the deciding factor was desire for change. “Roh symbolises that as a politician from outside the mainstream,” he said.
Roh’s remark on Wednesday that Seoul could intervene to stop any conflict between North Korea and the United States prompted Chung, a vice-president of world soccer body FIFA, to bolt. Roh, 56, the son of poor chicken farmers and working man’s advocate and Chung, the scion of the founder of one of Korea’s biggest conglomerates, the Hyundai Group, often seemed a political odd couple.
COVERT NUCLEAR PROGRAMME: North Korea’s admission in October that it had revived a covert nuclear weapons programme stoked tensions on the peninsula and should have helped Lee, whose views on North Korea mirror those of US President George W. Bush.
Washington says the North has admitted resuming a nuclear weapons programme.
But surveys of voters showed that was not their primary concern — Seoul residents have been living within artillery range of North Korea for half a century and have grown used to North Korean threats and provocations.—Reuters
