Park Geun-hye has been elected as South Korea’s 18th President on December 19. Park is the first-ever female president in the nation.

Park garnered roughly 15.77 million votes, or 51.6 percent of ballots cast. She triumphed by a margin of 1.1 million votes over the main opposition Democratic United Party candidate Moon Jae-in, who finished the race with 14.69 million votes, or 48 percent of ballots cast. Vote counting was completed around 5:20 a.m. Thursday.

People were expected that if over 70 percent of the population took part in the election, it would give an advantage to Moon. However, though 75.8 percent of people participated, Park still won. Wednesday’s election was the first in which the successful candidate won at least 50 percent of the vote, since 1987 when a direct presidential election system was introduced.

Experts said the main factor that brought triumph to Park was people’s concern about Korea’s unstable economy and defense situation. The former president Roh Moo-hyun’s administration was viewed by many in Korea as weakening Korea’s economy and national defense, and since candidate Moon had worked and shared most of views with Roh, lots of people were doubting Moon’s ability to lead the nation, making conservative people inclined to vote for Park.

Park beat Moon in 13 out of 17 metropolitan cities and provinces, excluding Seoul, Gwangju and the two Jeolla provinces.

After hearing the news of her victory, Park said at Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul that she will lead a happy era for Korean people.

As the first female president, a lot of Korean people expect Park to bring positive changes to their country- in which women are notoriously invisible at the top echelons of public and private sectors alike.

In South Korea, which is Asia’s fourth-biggest economy, women account for only 15 percent of the country’s parliament seats and secure two seats at the 11-member cabinet. They are equally less visible at the top of private sectors, and that is mostly because of the country’s Confucious and male-dominated culture.

Mirroring this, Park’s party has promoted her as “the prepared female president,” and this slogan was punctuated in every single of her campaign posters and speeches.

Park, who was born in 1952, majored in electronic engineering at Sogang University in Seoul. She started her political career when she was 22-years-old, when she lost her mother to assassins, acting as the first lady of the house and helping her father, the late military strongman Park Chung-Hee. After her father was also assassinated when she was 27, she left the Blue House, the South Korean equivalent of the White House. However, in 1997, she announced that she would come back as a politician to contribute to Korea, which has been suffering from the impact of the Asian economic crisis. Since then, she has been worshiped by conservative voters.

Her first run for the presidency was in 2007. However, current president Lee Myung-bak was able to defeat her.

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The historical election night is long over and the cloud hangs of numerous petitions, signed by 39 states, to secede from the United States.

In the wake of the re-election of U.S. President Barack Obama there have been quite a few objections, mainly from the voices of people residing in more conservative states. Citizens are signing petitions by the masses to be granted permission “to peacefully withdraw from the United States of America and to create their own government,” according to the White House’s We the People Petition website.

The 39 states that have signed the petition are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming and Virginia. While most of the states aforementioned are from the Deep South, a few of them are blue states.

“Every petition that crosses the threshold will receive a response but we don’t comment on what the substance of that response will be before it’s issued,” a White House Official told political website nextgov.com.

The petitions of Louisiana, Florida and Texas have reached beyond the threshold of 25,000 signatures. Texas, which considers itself as a “republic,” not a state, leads the pack with 82,580 and its petition was created on November 9. Louisiana, which was the first state to create a petition the day after President Obama was re-elected comes second with 31,072 signatures. Florida has 26,020 signatures and was created on November 10. All three of these petitions will receive an official response from the Obama administration.

Each petition is similar if not identical in content quoting from the 1776 Declaration of Independence, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

“…Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and institute new Government…”

The backlash of the petitions came in the form of responses petitions to ‘Strip the Citizenship from Everyone who Signed a Petition to Secede and Exile Them and to Deport Everyone That Signed A Petition To Withdraw Their State From The United States Of America’. While elected official Gov. Perry took a more objective approach, he said he “believes in the greatness of our Union and nothing should be done to change it. But he also shares the frustrations many Americans have with our federal government.”

Petitions have a lifespan of a month if they don’t reach the threshold of 25,000 signatures and a majority of the state petitions attempting to secede from the Union may or may not make the cut but a few of the conservative Deep South states have the higher numbers and will probably receive an official response from the Obama administration.

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