South Korea Presidential Election 2012: First Female President Park Geun-hye Wins, Wants Talks With North Korea

South Korea elected its first female president on Wednesday.

Park Geun-hye, a 60-year-old conservative, defeated her liberal opponent Moon Jae-in, a human rights lawyer.

More than 88 percent of the votes cast in the election have been counted, and Park holds an insurmountable lead of 51.6 percent to 48 percent for Moon.

Moon conceded the election and jubilant Park supporters celebrated in the cold.

Park will serve a single five-year term. The South Korean constitution prohibits presidents from serving consecutive terms.

Park is no stranger to the presidential palace. Her father, Park Chung-hee, ruled South Korea for 18 years--first as a military dictator who seized power in a coup, then as the formally-elected president-until his assassination in 1979.

Park Chung-hee oversaw South Korea's recovery from the Korean War a decade earlier, and is either regarded as a military hero or a despot, depending on political outlook.

Park Geun-hye, for her part, ran on a relatively moderate platform, and has made much of her gender, calling for some changes to South Korea's culture of chauvinism. Women in South Korea are still typically expected to be homemakers, and those who do work make 40 percent less than their male counterparts.

Park has compared herself to other famous conservative women, including Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel, though her efforts to compare herself to England's Queen Elizabeth I, the absolute monarch from the 16th Century worry opponents who remember her father's brutal rule.

Her primary focus will be the economy, which is suffering from anemic growth rates.

Park has also vowed to negotiate with North Korea, the insular and totalitarian state now ruled by Kim Jong-un, the young son of deceased idiosyncratic dictator Kim Jong-il.

Kim Jong-un took power almost exactly a year ago, and his attempts to consolidate his power among the military generals have led to grandstanding on the world stage.

Last week, North Korea successfully launched its first rocket that deposited a payload into orbit, demonstrating its offensive capabilities.

But old rivalries may flare up. Kim Jong-un's grandfather, Kim Il Sung, was the leader of North Korea at the time that Park's father was president of Korea. Kim Il Sung ordered several assassination attempts on Park's father, one of which resulted in the death of her mother.