Park Geun-hye

Park Geun-hye was South Korea's first woman president and the first to be removed from office by impeachment, in a scandal that began with a tablet computer. She is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the general who ruled from 1961 to 1979, and she acted as first lady from the age of twenty-two, after her mother was killed by a bullet meant for her father during a speech in 1974; her father was shot dead by his own intelligence chief five years later. She entered politics in 1998 and led the conservative party through two elections, winning the presidency in 2012 on a platform of economic democratisation and welfare expansion that she largely did not deliver. Her handling of the Sewol ferry disaster in 2014, in which more than three hundred people died, most of them schoolchildren, damaged her irreparably: she was unaccounted for during the first seven hours of the rescue. In late 2016 it emerged that Choi Soon-sil, a private friend with no official position and the daughter of a cult leader who had attached himself to Park after her mother's death, had been editing presidential speeches, receiving classified papers and extracting tens of millions of dollars from the chaebol. Candlelight protests brought over a million people into Seoul week after week. The National Assembly impeached her in December 2016 and the Constitutional Court upheld it unanimously in March 2017. She was sentenced to more than twenty years for bribery and abuse of power, and the Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong was convicted of paying. She was pardoned by her successor Moon Jae-in at the end of 2021 after nearly five years in prison. She returned to politics far enough to appear at a party event in 2024. Her father remains among the most divisive figures in South Korean memory, credited with the industrial takeoff and responsible for the Yushin dictatorship.

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