Defiance and Disillusionment in Heartland of South Korean President’s Support

DAEGU, South Korea — Like many of her fellow citizens, Kum Cheong-sup is outraged by the political crisis that is engulfing South Korea’s president.

But unlike the vast majority of them, who have turned against President Park Geun-hye because they believe she has brought an ever-widening corruption scandal on herself, Ms. Kum, 79, sees her as an innocent victim of a friend who has taken advantage of her.

“Park Geun-hye herself is not a bad person,” said Ms. Kum, wielding a small razor blade to whittle off the scraggly roots of scallions at a vegetable stall in Seomun Market, here in the city where Ms. Park was born. “She has been swindled.”

Daegu, a center of textile and machinery industries about 150 miles southeast of Seoul, is the heartland of Ms. Park’s support — or what little remains of it, after an influence-peddling scandal involving a longtime friend and shadowy adviser to the president who has been compared to Rasputin.

While her nationwide approval rating has dropped into the low single digits, according to Gallup Korea, she retains higher support in Daegu, especially among people 60 and older.

To this stalwart cohort, Ms. Park is a proxy for her father, Park Chung-hee, the divisive Cold War dictator who attended teachers college and taught in Daegu before embarking on a military career. He took over South Korea in a coup in 1961 and ruled until he was assassinated in 1979.

Conservatives who lived through the period of rapid economic growth that he oversaw still revere him as the father of modern South Korea, crediting him not only with lifting the country out of poverty but also with guarding against Communist threats from the North.

For a dozen years as a member of the National Assembly, Ms. Park represented a district in Daegu, the country’s fourth-largest city. When she ran for president in 2012, she received about 80 percent of the city’s vote. Many who voted for her expected her to carry on her father’s legacy.

Daegu “has been the source of unconditional support for both Park Chung-hee and Park Geun-hye,” said Jeon Hyun-soo, a professor of modern Korean history at Kyungpook National University in the city.

Now, Mr. Jeon said, as the Assembly prepares for an impeachment vote on Friday, President Park’s few remaining loyal followers are concentrated among older, uneducated and poor citizens.

Across the country, intellectual conservatives are angered by what they see as a witch hunt driven by the news media and opposition parties, yet many of them no longer support Ms. Park personally. Yi Mun-yol, a prominent conservative novelist, said that the news media had failed to differentiate between rumor and fact as the scandal unfolded, and he accused the opposition of instigating public protests.

But he called the president “incompetent” and said she had shown poor judgment by associating with the wrong people.

“To be frank, she never satisfied my expectations,” Mr. Yi said during an interview at his home in a writer’s colony in Icheon, about 35 miles southeast of Seoul.

Even in Daegu, “many of the educated older people have left her,” said Yi Cheong-ki (no relation to Yi Mun-yol), director of operations for the local constituency office of Ms. Park’s governing party.

“Daegu citizens supported Park Geun-hye more passionately than in other areas,” Mr. Yi said. “That is why it comes across as such a shock and disappointment.”

In what appeared to be a last-ditch effort to court her remaining supporters, Ms. Park visited Daegu last week, making a rare public appearance after a fire destroyed parts of Seomun Market. During her brief visit, some supporters shouted her name, but protesters nearby called for her to be impeached or immediately resign. Ms. Park’s office told reporters that after she returned to her car, she wept.

Earlier this week, stall owners and shoppers who voted for Ms. Park four years ago expressed a mixture of defiance and disillusionment.

“Why don’t they leave her to run the country for the little time she has left?” said Suh Yi-ju, 69, owner of a market stall selling coffee, eggs, crackers, chips and fish-cake skewers. “That is the way to help the country, but they are just saying, ‘Impeach, impeach.’ ”

Ms. Suh, who said that she admired Ms. Park and that her father had “brought the country to where we are today,” said the enormous public protests demanding Ms. Park’s removal showed that “democracy has become too excessive.”

“Public opinion can turn even a pretty person into an ugly person,” she said. “You can criticize a little or criticize a lot, but if you criticize a lot, the false becomes the truth.”

But Yi Kyu-yeon, 58, an owner of a stationery store in the market, said that Ms. Park should be impeached because she had abused her power. “What she did was very wrong,” he said.

The biggest loss, he said, was to Ms. Park’s late father.

“His legacy is being buried,” Mr. Yi said. “It is being sold off wholesale. It’s guilt by association. If you start to hate one person, you will start to hate the whole team.”

Across the city at Kyungpook National University, Kim Seong-young, 25, a chemical engineering student, said the nostalgic older generation had made a mistake in expecting Ms. Park to carry on her father’s legacy in the first place.

Mr. Kim, who stood outside in below-freezing weather carrying a poster board with the slogan “Out with Park Geun-hye,” said his own hometown, Ulsan, had benefited greatly from Park Chung-hee’s policies.

“But I think it would be superficial and you would be gullible to believe that the daughter would be able to do what Park Chung-hee did,” he said.