Dictator’s Ghost Hovers Over Troubled S. Korea

SEOUL — For advertising executive Lee Cho Keun, financially troubled South Korea’s decision last week to seek an International Monetary Fund bailout of tens of billions of dollars was a humiliating blow.

“Korea’s pride is hurt,” said Lee, 44. “We’ve been saying that Korea is the world’s 11th-largest economy, and now this! We are angry that the politicians couldn’t deal with this better. We feel that what could have been stopped with a shovel now must be stopped with a bulldozer.”

With recent polls showing lame-duck President Kim Young Sam’s popularity scraping bottom at less than 10%--compared with more than 90% support early in his term--South Koreans are longing for a strong leader they can respect, Lee and many others here say.

In a hard-fought campaign for the Dec. 18 election to choose Kim’s successor, three major candidates are vying to become that person.

But perhaps because all three candidates are flawed, the ghost of a former president is hovering over the race: the late Park Chung Hee, a dictator whose contributions to South Korea’s economic growth during his 1961-1979 rule recently have been more widely praised than they had been for years.

“Everybody, especially people in business, is complaining that the economy is terrible. They want to see a strong leader,” said Shung Man Hyang, 39, a restaurant manager who said his sales are down 50% this year. “People’s longing for Park Chung Hee, or a strong leader, may get stronger.”

Park’s high-growth miracle was built around a few dozen huge family-owned conglomerates that were fueled with immense government-directed bank loans, targeted to promote key industries regardless of profitability. That system lifted South Korea from a poverty-stricken agricultural society into an industrialized powerhouse. But now the system is falling apart. Seven of the nation’s biggest conglomerates have financially collapsed this year.

Conditions attached to the IMF bailout, the terms of which are now being negotiated, are likely to further dismantle the old economic structure, moving South Korea closer to a U.S.-style open market economy. Seoul’s initial request was for at least $20 billion in immediate rescue funds, but it is widely expected that the total figure will be more than double that amount.

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Even though South Korea’s current financial difficulties have their roots in the inadequacies of the economic structure Park created, he still represents an era of strong national pride and rapid economic growth.

“I think the nostalgia will get stronger, because ordinary people are not very well-versed in economic theory. They just long for those days of high growth,” said Lee, the advertising executive. “I think it’s not healthy to have that nostalgia, because Park Chung Hee, despite his success at building the economy, did suppress freedom. For example, I had to cut my hair shorter than I wanted to in those days, and I did not like it.”

Nostalgia for Park--and the wish for a hero that this feeling represents--may have unpredictable consequences as the current election campaign unfolds and a new president takes office in February. Supporters of each of the three major candidates see ways in which desire for a strong leader could benefit their man.

Opposition leader Kim Dae Jung, 73, is the consistent front-runner in polls, with a bit more than one-third of the support. He is a hero of South Korea’s democracy movement, but his critics see him as too old and too much a part of a political era that should be left behind.

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Ruling party nominee Lee Hoi Chang, 62, a former Supreme Court justice, recently has jumped to second in the polls, after having been badly hurt early in the campaign by revelations that both his sons avoided compulsory military service by being underweight. That badly dented his image as a “Mr. Clean.” But he appears to be closing fast on front-runner Kim.

Now running third in the polls, after placing second for much of the fall, is former Kyonggi province Gov. Rhee In Je, 48, who lost to Lee in the ruling New Korea Party’s nomination race, then launched an upstart independent bid for the presidency when Lee’s popularity started to fade. Rhee bears a striking physical resemblance to the late President Park. He openly benefited from that early in his campaign, as the wave of Park nostalgia and his own youthful image powered him well past Lee in the polls. Rhee even noted a few times in campaign speeches that he was exactly the same height as Park.

But Rhee floundered, many Koreans say, in a series of televised debates. Critics also hold it against him that he broke his earlier pledge to support the ruling party’s nominee. Rhee has been hurt recently by widespread suspicions that the unpopular President Kim is secretly backing his campaign.

“How can he be likened to Park Chung Hee, except that he looks like him?” asked Kim Jung Sook, 44, a homemaker interviewed while shopping in the fancy Shinsegai Department store in downtown Seoul. “Our economy was in a bad situation and people wanted someone with a decisive mind to revive the economy. Rhee In Je came on the scene and he looked like Park Chung Hee. That may be why some people were attracted to him.”

Kim, who had just spent $70 to buy cosmetics, said she plans to vote for Lee, partly because of his recent alliance with former Seoul Mayor Cho Soon, a respected economist and former central bank governor. “People think incumbent President Kim Young Sam lacks determination, and people want someone with determination,” she explained. “Personally, I think the Lee Hoi Chang-Cho Soon alliance will have that determination. It will be a good combination.”

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Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.