SEOUL, South Korea — Lee Myung-Bak, a can-do former construction boss nicknamed “the bulldozer,” won a landslide victory Wednesday in the South Korean presidential election.
Lee’s margin of victory, the largest since democratic presidential elections began here 20 years ago, decisively ended a decade of rule by Presidents Kim Dae-Jung and his successor Roh Moo-Hyun, former dissidents who had focused on reconciliation with North Korea.
The communist North, which has agreed in recent months to disable its nuclear facilities, was barely an issue in this presidential campaign. Similarly, allegations of corruption against Lee, which surfaced noisily over the weekend, left voters unmoved.
“No one is absolutely clean when you strip-search successful and wealthy businessmen in Korea,” said Ahn Jae-Woo, 54, an insurance executive who voted for Lee early in the morning before going Christmas shopping with his family in a Seoul mall. “This election is not about ethical issues; it’s about who is really capable of making Korea prosperous.”
South Korea’s export-driven economy has drifted a bit in recent years, and in the campaign Lee persuasively argued he alone was qualified to fix it.
“I know what you want so well,” he told the nation Wednesday night, after his opponents had conceded. “I will revive Korea’s economy at the bidding of the people. I will unify our society, which has been torn apart.”
Having held a commanding leading in opinion polls for months, Lee won with 48.7 percent of the vote, nearly double the 26.2 percent garnered by his closest competitor, Chung Dong-Young. Lee appeared to have drawn almost equally from young and older voters, gaining strong support from rural and urban areas alike.
