Anyone who went to bed early yesterday in South Korea will have woken up this morning as if nothing – or almost nothing – had happened. But in between, for a few hours, a political earthquake has kept the country and the rest of the world in suspense. Now there is the hangover, the extent of which has yet to be determined. The political back-and-forth in Seoul began on Tuesday night, when it declared emergency martial law without prior notice, accusing the opposition of controlling Parliament, engaging in anti-state activities and sympathizing with North Korea. Hours later, in the early morning, Yoon himself announced that he was withdrawing the measure after the Assembly, whose members even used fire extinguishers to prevent troops from entering the legislative headquarters, revoked it in an emergency vote, without all the deputies present and with the streets of Seoul, the capital, full of protesters.
The very brief statement could become the political epitaph of the current president. A coalition of legislators from opposition parties said this Wednesday that they plan to propose this same day a bill to remove Yoon. The proposal should be voted on within 72 hours. “Parliament should focus on immediately suspending the president’s affairs to pass an impeachment bill as soon as possible,” Hwang Un-ha, one of the coalition deputies, told the press.
Ten high-level advisors close to the president have offered to resign en masse this Wednesday, the presidential office has reported. Among them are the Chief of Staff, Chung Jin-suk, the director of the National Security Office, Shin Won-sik, and the person in charge of National Policy, Sung Tae-yook, details the Yonhap agency.
Although numerous analysts interpreted the plummeting popularity of the president and his growing difficulties in governing without a parliamentary majority, the mention of the hermetic neighbor to the north, with atomic capacity and a renewed harmony with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, put people on guard. the capitals of the planet. The Korean peninsula continues to be one of those volatile places, with wounds from the Cold War still open, and where everything can blow up due to a miscalculation: technically the north and the south are still at war despite the armistice sealed in 1953 ; Its border is militarized and, meanwhile, the United States, an ally of South Korea for decades, maintains more than 28,000 soldiers stationed in the country.
For a few hours it seemed that a new crisis was breaking out and the unpredictable Donald Trump was about to take the lead as the world’s leading power. The announcement that the military was taking command and political activities, demonstrations and strikes were prohibited and the media would be controlled, has also made the citizens of one of the most stable democracies in Asia hold their breath, consolidated since the 1980s.
Yoon’s announcement was immediately met with the majority rejection of opposition politicians and those of his own party, who called on the citizens and the military to reject the martial decree. The crisis is born from a convoluted and tempestuous internal politics. The Democratic Party, the main opposition force and the majority in Parliament, intended to present motions of censure this week to dismiss three prosecutors (including the chief prosecutor) for not pressing charges against the first lady, Kim Keon-heen, after a investigation into his alleged involvement in a stock market manipulation plot. In addition, this center-left formation intended to promote the dismissal of the president of the Audit and Inspection Board, Choe Jae-hae, for refusing to comply with a parliamentary request to hand over documents related to an audit on the relocation of the presidential office, which was held in 2022 as part of one of Yoon’s campaign promises.
Executive spokesperson Jeong Hye-jeon declared on Friday that the motion against Choe was “something unprecedented in our constitutional history and damages the foundations of the constitutional order,” according to the Yonhap agency. Regarding the attempted dismissal of the prosecutors, he noted: “It is clearly revenge, only because the results of the investigation were not what the opposition party wanted.”
The Government interpreted the motion as an attempt to stop other trials against members of the Democratic Party. Lee Jae-myong, leader of this center-left group, is being investigated for several cases, including the alleged acceptance of bribes in connection with illicit transfers to North Korea and for participating in a corruption scheme surrounding an urban development project. in Seongnam, a city located in the north of the country. At the beginning of November, he was sentenced to a suspended prison sentence for violating electoral law by making false public statements during the 2022 presidential campaign, an election in which he lost by a very narrow margin (0.73 percentage points) to the current president.
Yoon, who assumed the presidency in May of that year, is the first leader of South Korean democracy who has not had control of the National Assembly at any time during his term. Despite the fact that after the April legislative elections its party was even more weakened than in the first section of the legislature, the PPP retains enough seats to impose presidential vetoes. Yoon has made use of this mechanism 12 times in just over two years, which has caused 25 bills to fail. The most recent example is from just a week ago, after the National Assembly approved a legislative draft that proposed the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate two accusations related to the first lady: her alleged involvement in a stock manipulation scheme stock exchanges and their alleged interference in electoral nominations through a power intermediary.
The political and social situation in the country has been complicated for months. Yoon’s conservative party suffered a major defeat in legislative elections last April, ceding power in the unicameral assembly to the main opposition party, which took almost two-thirds of the seats. These elections were a kind of referendum on the president, in the absence of tangible progress in social and economic policies. South Korea faces problems such as a slowing economy, runaway housing prices and rising inflation. It also suffers from rapid growth and a huge gender gap. Added to all this throughout this year was a doctors’ strike that began in February and caused cancellations of operations and treatments.
