Bid for a Bigger Mandate

SOUTH KOREA

More than 250,000 people lined the sandy banks along the Susongchon River north of Pusan. "We should not delay the national task of modernizing Korea," President Chung Hee Park, 49, told them. "If we stop working now, Korea will waste another 20 years catching up." One hundred fifty miles away in Seoul, Old Campaigner and ex-President (1960-62) Posun Yun, 69, stirred another crowd of 250,000 by warning that Park's economic policies were wrecking the country. What is more, Yun charged, Park's government was "sick with corruption, irregularities and dictatorial authoritarianism."

It was election time in South Korea, and on the eve of this week's voting, the country echoed with the same names and many of the same words that it heard in the 1963 campaign. The difference is that in 1963 Park was the raw, untested military man who had seized power in 1961, then traded in his khaki for mufti and taken on Yun at the polls. Park won--but only by a mere 156,000 votes of the 11,000,000 cast (out of a population of 27 million). Going into this week's elections, Park has four years of civilian government and a strong record working for him.

Progress & Problems. Under the firm rule of Park's Democratic Republican Party, Korea is emerging from its long years of isolation (TIME, March 10). Park has sent 46,000 troops to Viet Nam, promoted regional economic cooperation among the non-Communist Asian Pacific nations and normalized relations with Japan--a move that has proved worth $800 million in grants and credits. Park's five-year development plan has sharply expanded foreign and domestic investment and, for the first time, started Korea on the road toward self-sufficiency. In the past five years, more than 3,600 new factories have been built, and another 18,000 small and medium-sized businesses have been set up, cutting unemployment from more than 11% in 1962 to a current 7%.

South Korea's progress, however, is not without problems. There is widespread corruption in lower levels of government; and out in the dirt-poor countryside, millions of Koreans have yet to share in prosperity. Claiming that Park's policies have only "made the rich richer and the poor poorer," Yun has traveled the country from one end to the other, promising that if elected he will cut fertilizer prices and general taxes, raise tax exemptions and increase government salaries 50%.

Yun's New Democratic Party will likely cut into Park's rural support in this week's election, but not enough to offset the government's gains in the cities and along the eastern coast, where South Korea's prosperity is most evident. Overall, Park is expected to increase his 1963 margin.

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