Ms. Park has sought to play up her clean image by distancing herself from President Lee Myung-bak, the former head of a major construction company, who has been hurt by money-related scandals. Earlier this year, she led an emergency committee to revive her Grand National Party by renaming it Saenuri. She has also moved it to the left with a new platform of more robust welfare programs to appeal to voters fed up with the nation’s jobless recovery after the global financial crisis.

However, to hear her and many others here tell it, her main appeal is not her policies, but her character. Before the parliamentary elections last week, she impressed voters with her tireless campaigning, shaking hands until she had to wrap one wrist in a thick white bandage. After it was over, she said her track record of keeping promises had carried the day.

“I think the people’s trust that we will keep our promises no matter what is what led to this election result,” she said in an e-mail last Saturday.

Since becoming a lawmaker more than a decade ago, she has tried to keep herself from being soiled by politics, including the occasional brawls in Parliament. But one result is that she is often seen as being aristocratic and aloof, an image reinforced when one of her former aides publicly complained of being forced to hold the hood of Ms. Park’s raincoat over her head.

Ms. Park also says very little in public about one of the most pioneering aspects of her political career, her gender. Analysts say her ties to her father have helped her break through the glass ceiling in this still strongly Confucian society. Indeed, she enjoys an almost saintlike aura among some of her followers as a woman who gave everything for her nation, losing both her father and her mother, and then forwent marriage and children.