SEOUL, South Korea - Roh Moo-hyun, a liberal lawyer who campaigned urging continued engagement with North Korea and greater autonomy from the United States, narrowly won the South Korean presidential election yesterday after a tumultuous campaign.
The victory of Roh, the candidate of the ruling Millennium Democratic Party, sets South Korea and the United States on the most divergent diplomatic paths they have followed in a half-century of close military and economic alliance.
With about 86 percent of the votes counted, Roh held a lead of 48.9 percent to 46.6 percent over Lee Hoi-chang, a staunchly conservative ex-supreme court justice who lost even more narrowly to the departing President Kim Dae Jung five years ago.
The Bush administration has spent the past three months pressing traditional friends such as Japan and newer ones, such as Russia and China, to increase pressure on North Korea to force that country to abandon its nuclear weapons program and to end its missile sales in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Roh, however, staked his campaign on continued engagement with North Korea and has forcefully ruled out deadlines or economic sanctions in dealing with South Korea's impoverished communist neighbor.
By contrast, Lee had said that South Korea should suspend its assistance to the North until Pyongyang cooperates on a number of issues, from arms control to family reunifications.
Roh's commitment to engagement with North Korea was so pronounced that it produced a stunning last-minute turn of events that some here feared could have cost him the election.
In the final day of campaigning Wednesday, Roh's comments about North Korea shocked a former rival candidate and 11th-hour supporter, Chung Mong-joon, scion of the Hyundai empire, causing him to drop their painstakingly arranged alliance. In that speech, with Chung standing nearby, Roh said, "If the U.S. and North Korea start a war, we will stop it."
Some took his comments to imply that South Korea would take a neutral position in any dispute between the United States and North Korea. Later that evening, through a spokesman, Chung denounced his former partner's speech, saying, "The United States is our ally and our view is that the U.S. has no reason to fight North Korea."
Many here assumed Chung's abrupt withdrawal of support would have a devastating impact on Roh's chances.
The two men forged their alliance last month after a hastily arranged primary election aimed at producing a candidacy that could defeat the conservative Lee, whom opinion surveys had until then consistently ranked as the frontrunner. Roh defeated Chung in the primary and was catapulted into the frontrunner's position.
Yesterday afternoon, Roh, 56, restated the assertive diplomatic position he has taken throughout the three-week campaign. "We must have dialogue with the North and with the U.S.," he told a crowd in downtown Seoul. "In this way, we must make sure that the North-U.S. dispute does not escalate into a war."
South Korean politics have a long history of dirty tricks. In the last election, the national intelligence service reportedly sought to pay North Korea to stage a border incident in order to boost the conservative candidate. So alternative theories abounded yesterday about Chung's motives, with people invoking everything from a fear of a vendetta against Hyundai if Lee won to heavy backstage lobbying by Washington.
If relations with North Korea have been at the center of the campaign from the start, South Korea's ties with the United States have been its barely concealed subtext. In recent weeks, the country has seen some of the biggest demonstrations in a generation as crowds in Seoul and other cities protested the acquittal of two U.S. soldiers in the accidental death of two schoolgirls who were crushed by their armored vehicle in June.
The anti-American sentiment appeared to give a strong boost to Roh, who once advocated the outright withdrawal of the United States' 37,000 troops from South Korea when he was a labor lawyer in the 1980s.
The protests appeared to put Lee, whose diplomatic views are close to those of the Bush administration, on the defensive.
Roh now must reconcile the dual yearnings of South Korea's sophisticated and increasingly affluent younger generations for more autonomy from the United States and reduced tensions with North Korea with his country's continued heavy reliance on U.S. security guarantees.