South Koreans Vote in Closely Fought Presidential Race

Voters were choosing a successor to President Lee Myung-bak, who by law cannot seek a second term. The race pits the conservative governing party’s candidate, Park Geun-hye, 60, daughter of the late dictator Park Chung-hee, against her liberal rival Moon Jae-in, 59, a former human rights lawyer who was once imprisoned for opposing her father. With both campaigns having featured similar messages about a more inclusive economy and less tension with the North, the candidates were hoping to win over what appeared to be a large number of still-undecided voters, who polls have indicated want a new direction for the country but are disenchanted with the established parties.

Few analysts interviewed Wednesday were confident about predicting the outcome. "This is probably the most closely contested presidential election ever in South Korean history," said Choi Jin, head of the Institute of Presidential Leadership in Seoul. By midafternoon, turnout was higher than it had been at the same point in the past two presidential elections, according to the election authorities.

If elected, Ms. Park, a five-term lawmaker, would be the first female president of South Korea, which is still a male-dominant society despite the inroads women have made in corporate and government hierarchies in recent years. She would also be the first child of a past president to hold the office.

Ms. Park’s popularity is due in large part to her father, who remains a polarizing figure 33 years after his assassination by his disgruntled spy chief in 1979. Those who braved freezing weather in downtown Seoul to hear her speak on Tuesday, the last day of campaigning, were mostly people in their 50s and older, a generation that tends to harbor nostalgia for Park Chung-hee’s 18-year authoritarian rule, during which the South Korean economy skyrocketed.

"I have no family to take care of. I have no child to inherit my properties," Ms. Park, who has never married, said Tuesday. "You, the people, are my only family and to make you happy is the reason I do politics, and if elected, I would govern like a mother dedicated to her family."

Ms. Park’s most ardent critics, who form the basis of Mr. Moon’s support, are young voters whose disenchantment with the political establishment has deepened as their job opportunities have dwindled in recent years, even as the country’s politically connected conglomerates have made record profits. Another core group of Moon supporters is older voters who remember Park Chung-hee not as the overseer of economic revival, but as a ruthless dictator whose regime tortured dissidents and framed them as Communist subversives, and who banned such things as rock music and miniskirts. In the last years of her father’s rule, Ms. Park, whose mother was killed by another assassin’s bullet in 1974, effectively served as his first lady, and many of her progressive critics see her bid for the presidential Blue House as an attempt to turn the clock back.

"When I was living in poverty, she was living like a princess in the Blue House; when I was fighting dictatorship, she was at the very heart of it," Mr. Moon, who was chief of staff under President Lee’s liberal predecessor, Roh Moo-hyun, has said. "Her Saenuri Party is disqualified and unable to represent our nation. It must be replaced with a brand-new team."

Both candidates have promised to cut college tuition by half, spend more on welfare and provide small businesses with economic protection from the unpopular, family-controlled conglomerates known as chaebol. They have also said that President Lee’s hard-line policy on North Korea has failed and that they would attempt to engage the regime with both dialogue and aid.

Poll numbers released on Dec. 12, the last day new survey results could legally be published, indicated that Ms. Park was leading Mr. Moon by an average of about 2 percent, but they found Mr. Moon to be narrowing the gap. People in their 50s and older preferred Ms. Park, while Mr. Moon maintained a dominant lead among voters in their 20s and 30s. The country’s jobless rate for those 15 to 29 years old is more than double the national average of 3.1 percent.

Turnout has historically been stronger among older South Korean voters. Mr. Moon spent the last week exhorting young South Koreans to punish the government of Mr. Lee, which has recently been plagued by corruption scandals involving his relatives and former aides, by rejecting Ms. Park. He also stressed that the country’s conglomerate-dominated economic model, long credited for fueling growth but increasingly blamed for widening the gap between rich and poor, was established under Ms. Park’s father.

Still, Mr. Moon’s Democratic United Party, itself mired in political infighting, may be hard-pressed to characterize itself as anti-establishment among young voters who have expressed disdain for both established parties. Many young voters had enthusiastically supported another liberal candidate, Ahn Cheol-soo, a software mogul and university dean with no political experience, but Mr. Ahn withdrew from the race last month and backed Mr. Moon.

"This election will be decided by the voter turnout, by how many young people vote," said Kim Ji-yoon, a polling expert at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul.

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Four White South Africans Charged With A.N.C. Bomb Plot

Prosecutor Shaun Abrahams said the men had planned to attack an ANC meeting, currently under way in the city of Bloemfontein, as a step towards carving an independent Boer republic out of Nelson Mandela's post-apartheid "Rainbow Nation".

The four, named as Mark Trollip, John Martin Keevy, Johan Prinsloo and Hein Boonzaaier, were brought into court surrounded by police and security guards armed with assault rifles.

Their lawyers did not enter a plea, and the men, aged between 40 and 50 and dressed in shirts and jeans, remained silent and impassive throughout the 20-minute hearing.

The vast majority of whites accepted the ANC victory in the 1994 election that brought Mandela to power and ended decades of white-minority rule. However, a tiny minority continues to oppose the historic political settlement.

The attack plan, which the plotters code-named "The Slaughter of Mangaung" - 'cheetah' in the local Sesotho language - included a mortar bomb attack on marquees housing ANC delegates.

That was to be followed by a ground assault targeting Zuma and cabinet ministers as they had dinner, Abrahams told the court. Zuma and others were to be shot "in execution style", he said.

The intention of the group, which had been trying to buy AK-47 assault rifles, was "directly aimed at eliminating the leadership of this country," Abrahams said.

The plan was about a year in the making, he added, and was timed to coincide with the December 16 anniversary of the 1838 Battle of Blood River, in which fewer than 500 Afrikaners defeated more than 10,000 Zulus.

The battle, in which 3,000 Zulus are said to have died against three wounded Afrikaners, has been mythologised in the history of the Afrikaners, the white minority descended from South Africa's earliest Dutch-speaking settlers.

The Afrikaner-dominated apartheid government commemorated Blood River as a public holiday, but since 1994, December 16 has been rebranded "Reconciliation Day" in a bid to heal the wounds of three centuries of white dominance and conflict.

The four men were detained on Sunday and Abrahams said more arrests were likely to follow.

ANC spokesman Keith Khoza said the suspected plot amounted to "an act of terrorism that South Africa can ill afford".

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Writing by Ed Cropley; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

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With South Korean Election, Policy Toward North Will Change

But the question of how much aid and investment South Korea should offer the North, and under what conditions, has become a major point of contention, one that could create discord with Washington.

The neck-and-neck race pits Park Geun-hye, the candidate of President Lee Myung-bak’s conservative Saenuri Party, against Moon Jae-in, who represents the liberal Democratic United Party.

Their backgrounds are as different as those of any two Koreans could be. Ms. Park is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, who ruled South Korea with an iron fist from 1961 to 1979. Mr. Moon is a former student activist who was jailed in the 1970s for opposing Mr. Park’s dictatorship.

But both agree that Mr. Lee’s policy of backing international sanctions to compel North Korea to end its nuclear programs and refraining from dialogue with the North has failed to tame its hostility toward the South. North Korea’s successful launching of a three-stage rocket on Wednesday has not changed the candidates’ promises to provide more generous aid to the North and to try to hold talks with its new leader, Kim Jong-un.

“The launch doesn’t seem to be having much effect on the current presidential contest one way or the other,” said John Delury, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul who is an expert on North Korea. Here in the South Korean capital, not far from the North Korean border, “most people don’t see this rocket launch as a security threat, for the simple reason that North Korea can use quicker and more effective short- and midrange capabilities to strike the South, if it ever came to that,” Mr. Delury said.

For the Obama administration, the timing of the transition of power in South Korea is problematic. After the rocket launching, American officials talked of imposing “Iran-like sanctions” on North Korea, suggesting curbs on investment and banking outside the country and on purchases of North Korean goods. Finding new sanctions that truly hurt will be difficult; the North is already one of the most penalized countries on earth.

But winning approval of those sanctions in the United Nations Security Council will be even more difficult if South Korea appears to be headed in the other direction. Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations, clashed on Wednesday with her Chinese counterpart over whether the rocket launching merited a response at all; the Chinese argued it did not. Marshaling support among United States allies will be almost impossible if a new South Korean president is announcing renewed initiatives.

“This could put us back to where we were in the Bush administration,” one American diplomat said, “where the White House was going in one direction, imposing sanctions, and a South Korean president was going in the other.”

President Obama and President Lee have pursued a policy of “strategic patience,” isolating and penalizing North Korea for its provocations and hoping that China would rein in its ally. China never did.

“The United States is more than willing to let South Korea take the lead on North Korea — as long as it is comfortable with the general direction,” said David Straub, deputy director at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. “The Obama administration will only be willing to go so far unless and until Pyongyang signals a genuine willingness to negotiate away its nuclear and missile programs on reasonable terms.”

Mr. Lee’s liberal predecessors, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, pursued a “sunshine policy” of reconciliation and economic cooperation with North Korea from 1998 to 2008. Billions of dollars of South Korean investment, aid and goods flowed into the North to encourage it to shed its isolation and hostility, and to try to reduce the economic gap between the two Koreas and the cost of reunification in the future.

When the political pendulum swung toward Mr. Lee, who took office in 2008, he reversed the policy and said the North would need to give up its nuclear weapons if it wanted South Korean largess to continue. In the years that followed, the North cut off all official dialogue, conducted its second nuclear test, launched a long-range test missile, was accused of sinking a South Korean warship and fired an artillery barrage at a South Korean island.

“Lee Myung-bak’s policy did nothing to stop North Korea from expanding its nuclear capability or change its behavior — it only worsened the problem,” said Mr. Moon, who wants to revive the sunshine policy.

David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington.

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