South Korean President-Elect Calls for Reconciliation After Tight Race

South Korea’s president-elect, Park Geun-hye, called for national reconciliation on Thursday and met with foreign envoys in Seoul, a day after she was elected the country’s first female leader in a close contest that reflected generational and regional divides and growing unease over North Korea’s military threat.

Ms. Park, 60, the daughter of South Korea’s longest-ruling dictator, won 51.6 percent of the votes cast on Wednesday to choose a successor to President Lee Myung-bak, who was barred by law from seeking a second term.

Ms. Park met Thursday with the ambassadors from the United States, China, Japan and Russia, the four other countries involved with the two Koreas in talks over the North’s nuclear weapons programs. The meetings reflected the sensitive timing of her election — she is to be inaugurated in February, not long after President Obama begins his second term in Washington. South Korea fears that Japan will form an increasingly nationalist cabinet following its parliamentary election last Sunday. Seoul has also grown increasingly concerned about how to position itself between its traditional ally the United States and a rising China.

Mr. Obama said he would work closely with Ms. Park. Japan’s prime-minister-in-waiting, Shinzo Abe, said Thursday that he would seek close communication with her, according to Japan’s Kyodo news agency. The three leaders’ most urgent joint task is how to deal with North Korea’s expanding nuclear and missile programs, as demonstrated by its launch of a long-range rocket last week. Ms. Park on Thursday referred to the launch as “a symbolic demonstration of how serious a challenge we face in national security."

“North Korea will wait a few months to see if Park Geun-hye will appease it with money,” said Andrei Lankov, a North Korea specialist at Kookmin University in Seoul. “If she does not — and it looks unlikely that she will, given her statements so far and the hard-liners surrounding her — then North Korea will launch provocations.”

With Ms. Park’s election, South Korea extended the tenure of its staunchly pro-American governing party and handed power to the first woman to win the post in a deeply patriarchal part of Asia. Voters appeared to prefer stability over Mr. Moon’s calls for radical change.

“This is a victory for the people’s wish to overcome crises and revive the economy,” Ms. Park told her cheering supporters after the results came in, a crowd that had gathered in freezing weather in downtown Seoul to celebrate a woman whose steeliness in the face of adversity is legend. According to her memoir, when told of her father’s assassination in 1979, she responded, “Is everything all right along the border with North Korea?”