Park Geun-hye

Biography

Park Geun-hye was born in Daegu in 1952, the eldest child of Park Chung Hee, who seized power in 1961 and ruled South Korea until 1979, and his wife Yuk Young-soo. She grew up in Seoul and graduated in electronic engineering from Sogang University in 1974. After her mother was killed in a 1974 attempt on her father's life, she acted as First Lady until her father was assassinated by his intelligence chief in October 1979.

She entered the National Assembly at a 1998 by-election for Dalseong in Daegu as a member of the conservative Grand National Party and was re-elected three times. As party chairwoman from 2004 to 2006 she led it through a difficult general election and a string of local and by-election wins that earned her the nickname 'Queen of Elections'; in 2006 she survived a knife attack during a campaign event. She lost the party's 2007 presidential nomination narrowly to Lee Myung-bak, and in 2011-2012 led the renamed Saenuri Party to an unexpected win in the April 2012 parliamentary election.

In December 2012 she was elected president, the first woman to hold the office, and took office in February 2013. Her government was criticised over its response to the sinking of the Sewol ferry in April 2014, and in December 2015 it concluded an agreement with Japan on the comfort women issue. In late 2016 revelations that her confidante Choi Soon-sil had influenced state affairs and extracted money from businesses led to mass protests; the National Assembly impeached her on 9 December 2016 and the Constitutional Court removed her from office on 10 March 2017.

She was arrested at the end of March 2017 and in 2018 sentenced to long prison terms for abuse of power and coercion, misuse of intelligence funds and interference in party primaries. President Moon Jae-in pardoned her in December 2021 and she was released at the end of that month.