“Making Korea great again” did not work. So far
5 March 2025 15:11
ANALYSIS
A right-wing political leader, a self-confident patriot trying to assert his power in the country and rule without regard to the opposition. Does this sound familiar? This is not about Putin’s Russia or even Trump’s America. It is about the Republic of Korea. But an autocratic turn in this country is not destined to happen. At least not yet. The president was impeached. How did Korean society manage not to slide into authoritarianism? "Komersant Ukrainian" analyzed it.
The dots are not yet dotted in this story. For several weeks now, battles have been going on in the Constitutional Court of Korea, where the resigned president is trying to prove his case. It is possible that he will succeed, and the court will restore his rule, returning him to his lost position. The court in this democracy is an independent branch of government, and it is not always possible to predict its decisions.
The National Assembly, the South Korean parliament, is constitutionally authorized to impeach the president, but this does not mean his or her permanent removal from power. The president’s powers are only suspended for 180 days, during which the Constitutional Court must consider whether the president has violated the country’s constitution and exceeded his authority.
Prosecutors have launched an investigation against Yun Seok-yol, the thirteenth president of the Republic of Korea, on charges of treason and abuse of power. The Constitutional Court must answer the question: did the president have legal grounds to declare martial law on December 3, 2024? If the answer is no, and at least six out of eight judges vote in favor, new presidential elections should be held within 60 days. If the court finds the president to be right, he will return to his post.
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The political process in South Korea
All this trouble happened because the president and the parliamentary majority belong to different political camps. Yun Seok-yeol was elected president in 2022. And in the 2024 parliamentary elections, the presidential party “Power of the People” (does this name sound familiar? Where have we heard it before?) won 116 seats, while the opposition United Democratic Party won 160 seats, which is a clear majority in the 300-member parliament.
The coexistence of the head of state and the opposition parliament did not work out well. MPs willingly blocked presidential legislative initiatives, including an important budget bill. So at some point, Yun Seok-yol simply lost his patience, and on December 3, 2024, he did what he did-decided that martial law would solve all his problems.
The head of state banned “any political activity, including the activities of the National Assembly and local councils,” and sent several hundred soldiers to the parliament building. While they were breaking the windows, the MPs managed to gather a quorum and lift martial law with 190 votes. Yun Seok-yol accused the opposition of being committed to the DPRK’s communist regime and anti-state activities. The parliament then won: on December 14, the president was impeached, and on January 15, 2025, he was arrested.
Now, the lawyers of the suspended president are trying to prove that he introduced martial law temporarily and that it was only a gesture of warning to the opposition. Yoon’s side also denies his plans to arrest leading Korean politicians.
10 days later, again at the request of the Democratic Party, the acting president of Korea, Prime Minister Han Dak-soo, was impeached for vetoing two bills by the special prosecutor to investigate Yun Seok-yol and his wife Kim Kyung-hee, and for blocking the appointment of three judges to the Constitutional Court, whose nominations had already been approved by the National Assembly. After that, Vice Prime Minister Choi Sang-mok assumed the duties of both president and prime minister.
Boomerang in Korean
The most interesting thing is that it was the image of a tough fighter against politicians that allowed Yoon Seok-yol, the former Korean attorney general, to gain political weight among conservative voters and eventually win the presidential election. During his tenure as the country’s chief prosecutor, Yoon began investigating Cho Kook, the Justice Minister under previous President Moon Jae-in. Cho Kook, a liberal politician, served as minister for only 35 days, after which he was forced to resign due to a prosecutorial investigation into corruption. The then opposition Conservatives supported the investigation, while the then ruling Democrats opposed it. So the tough approach to political opponents that once brought Yun to political Olympus has now boomeranged back on him. The Democrats were happy to take revenge on him. It was not the first time they had done so.
Another strange episode with Yoon occurred in February 2022, when the former attorney general and future president himself came under prosecutorial investigation. He was accused of refusing to conduct a judicial search of the quarantine violators, the Shincheonji Church of Jesus religious sect, in February 2020, during the quarantine imposed in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic. The reason for the refusal was the advice of a shaman.
The prosecutor’s office was approached by the same Democratic Party that Yoon himself had “nightmarized” when he was Prosecutor General not long before. Yoon Seok-young was accused of dereliction of duty and abuse of power to obstruct the prosecutor’s investigation into the Shincheonji sect. But then it was over. Yoon’s political career was steadily rising until it reached the top.
Will the Korean Democrats succeed in getting even with their staunch opponent this time? And let’s ask the question more broadly: does a politician with similar political views to the new American president have a chance to “make Korea great again”?
Author: Oleksandr Oles
