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SEOUL, South Korea — President Park Geun-hye of South Korea said Tuesday that she was willing to resign before her term ends, in an effort to head off a pending impeachment vote over a devastating corruption scandal.
“I am giving up everything now,” she said in a dramatic televised address, offering her third public apology for the scandal that has paralyzed her government for weeks.
But opposition lawmakers immediately rejected the offer, calling it a ploy meant to divide her political opponents and allow Ms. Park to survive in office, and they vowed to proceed with a call for an impeachment vote on Friday.
In her speech, Ms. Park admitted no legal wrongdoing and did not give a date for her resignation, saying she would let the National Assembly decide.
“If the governing and opposition parties inform me of the way to minimize the confusion and vacuum in state affairs and ensure a stable transfer of power,” she said, “I will step down as president according to their schedule and legal procedures.”
Opposition lawmakers said the offer was an attempt to buy time, in hopes that the opposition parties and members of her party who have supported impeachment would bicker over when she should step down and on whether impeachment should proceed.
“This is nothing but a sly trick to avoid impeachment,” said Youn Kwan-suk, a spokesman for the main opposition Democratic Party. “What the people wanted was her immediate resignation.”
Before Ms. Park’s televised address, even staunch allies in her party, Saenuri, had begun appealing to her to choose an “honorable retreat,” as opposition lawmakers have put it. After the speech, some of those people embraced her initiative, calling on lawmakers to discuss the offer rather than try to impeach her.
Ms. Park’s five-year term is scheduled to end in February 2018. If she resigned, she would be the first South Korean president to do so since 1960, when Syngman Rhee, the country’s founding president, fled into exile in Hawaii during popular uprisings against his corrupt, authoritarian government.
Ms. Park’s statement followed mounting pressure from ordinary South Koreans, who have taken to the streets in large numbers for five straight Saturdays to demand that she resign or be impeached and arrested.
The scandal engulfing Ms. Park’s government involves a longtime friend and secretive adviser to the president, Choi Soon-sil, who has been charged with extorting the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars from South Korean businesses. Prosecutors have said that Ms. Park helped her to do so.
Ms. Park cannot be indicted while in office, but she has been officially identified as a criminal suspect, a first for a president. Ms. Park has also been accused of helping Ms. Choi illegally gain access to confidential government documents.
Those who called for Ms. Park’s resignation have said it would spare the country several months of political uncertainty that a presidential impeachment would entail. If the National Assembly voted to impeach her, the deeply unpopular Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn, who is not an elected official, would serve as acting president while the Constitutional Court took up to six months to decide whether to ratify the impeachment vote.
During her speech Tuesday, Ms. Park said she had “agonized over countless nights” asking herself what was the best thing she could do for the country. She said her offer to step down would help defuse the political uncertainty and “put the country back on track.”
Before Tuesday, Ms. Park, speaking through her spokesman and her lawyer, had contended that the scandal did not justify cutting short her term. On Tuesday, she insisted that she did not profit from Ms. Choi’s alleged influence-peddling.
But in the past several days, she has come under increasingly vocal pressure to step down. Her approval ratings plunged to the low single digits, and dozens of lawmakers from her party were said to have decided to break ranks on impeachment, giving the measure enough votes to pass in the 300-seat National Assembly. It was not immediately clear whether any of them had changed their minds after Ms. Park’s speech.
Last week, her justice minister resigned, citing his inability to serve her during the scandal. On Sunday, 20 former parliamentary speakers, former prime ministers and religious leaders asked her to step down by April, so that the country and its political parties have enough time to prepare for the presidential election. By law, if the president resigns, the country must hold an election in 60 days.
Ms. Park suffered another blow on Monday, when important members of her party who had remained loyal to her urged her to step down. On Tuesday, before her speech, 25 first-term lawmakers from her party made the same appeal.
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