South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s fall was as fast as his ascent (original) (raw)
SEOUL — President Yoon Suk Yeol’s fall was as fast as his rise.
The political outsider squeaked into the presidency in 2022 on his first bid at public office. He’d gained prominence as the nation’s bullheaded top prosecutor, one who helped imprison two former presidents and investigatedsome of the most powerful business tycoons.
Podcast episode
Faced with the task of governing a deeply divided nation, Yoon chose instead to appeal to his conservative base, exacerbating the polarization. Over 2½ years, he appears to have become increasingly isolated and out of touch with the public, analysts say.
Then this month, he made a stunning decision that revealed the depths of his frustrations: He declared martial law — for the first time in more than four decades, and for the first time in South Korea’s democratic history.
“At the core of a liberal democracy are pluralism and tolerance for others. He doesn’t have any of that,” said Kang Won-taek, a political science professor at Seoul National University. “We all thought he was just politically inexperienced. We didn’t know his fundamental thinking was so extreme, but it was clearly revealed during martial law.”
Seoul residents protested martial law on Dec. 4. President Yoon Suk Yeol later said he would lift the martial law, just hours after he declared it. (Video: Julie Yoon, Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)
Yoon, 63, on Saturday became the third South Korean president to be impeached, condemned by even some in his People Power Party (PPP) who voted for his ouster. Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, a career civil servant who holds the No. 2 position in government, will serve as caretaker president.
Yoon’s fate now moves to the Constitutional Court, which will decide whether to uphold the impeachment charges, a process that could take up to six months. If the court decides the legislature’s decision is constitutional, Yoon will be removed from office and a new president will be elected within 60 days.
South Korea is no stranger to disgraced presidents. Nonetheless, Yoon’s downfall is unique even by South Korean standards.
Nearly every president since democratization in 1987 has become embroiled in scandals involving corruption, bribery, embezzlement or abuse of power. But Yoon is the first to declare martial law since South Korea shed its authoritarian past, and he is now being investigated on charges of insurrection.
Before Yoon, two other South Korean presidents faced impeachment proceedings. Park Geun-hye was impeached and removed from office in 2017 after a corruption scandal. In 2004, Roh Moo-hyun was impeached after charges of illegal campaigning but was reinstated after the Constitutional Court rejected the charges.
In his remarks Thursday, his first extended public appearance since the martial law gambit, Yoon blamed the Democratic-controlled National Assembly for a “parliamentary dictatorship” and for paralyzing his administration with repeated efforts to impeach top officials.
Yoon’s anger toward his political opponents was palpable. He accused them of “trying to turn SouthKorea into a haven for spies, a drug den and a gangster country.”
The speech underlined Yoon’s extreme views on the nature of politics, said Kang, the political scientist: “The opposition is a source of political competition. Yet he views them as an enemy that shakes the foundation of the nation, as an enemy to destroy. That shapes his perspective that he did the proper thing.”
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol on Dec. 12 defended his shock decision to declare martial law last week and vowed to “fight to the end.” (Video: The Washington Post)
Yoon argued that his martial law declaration was different from those of authoritarian leaders in the past, but the majority of South Koreans didn’t see it that way, public polling shows. The declaration of martial law resonated deeply among many in a nation with a painful history of brutal strongmen leaders who used martial law as a tool to quash political dissent — mainly in the 1960s and 1970s.
The moment made headlines in many countries, where people had grown more familiar in recent decades with South Korea’s K-pop and smartphone industries and its status as an advanced economy than with its authoritarian past.
It was a political miscalculation that underscored how out of touch he was with the South Korean public, experts say.
“I think he’s an isolated guy; he doesn’t really have a home grown base in the PPP,” said Katharine Moon, a professor emeritus of political science at Wellesley College. “He’s an outsider; he has not been taken seriously within his own party.”
Yoon maintained support from some within his party even as others defected to impeach him. Some pro-Yoon lawmakers said that while they did not support his decision to impose martial law, they did not believe he deserved to be pushed out of power because of it. Others defended Yoon’s decision as “courageous” in the face of opposition.
“To abandon the president to save yourself is the politics of betrayal,” Yoon Sang-hyun, a member of the People’s Power Party, told reporters ahead of the impeachment vote.
Since taking office, Yoon has struggled with low approval ratings and has been unable — and unwilling, some analysts say — to expand support for his presidency beyond his core faction.
“This is a man who was a civil servant and who is used to a bureaucratic way of life, and comes from a top-down approach with clear-cut rules and guidelines and legal codes and such,” Moon said. “That’s not politics. And he had such a thin sliver of public support when he came into office.”
Some of Yoon’s decisions — like improving relations with Japan — were controversial among the public. But in the past year, public discontent with Yoon’s handling of the government and economy grew, and his approval rating reached a record low of 17 percent in November, according to Gallup Korea.
“He appears to look at the South Korean public in this very black-and-white way. Everybody is either his friend or his foe,” said C. Harrison Kim, associate professor of Korean history at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Yoon also struggled with inflation and rising costs, and his handling of a crisis in the medical sector led to strikes and staff shortages this year, further chipping away at his political capital. He also began losing support within his cabinet and party, experts say, contributing to his isolation.
But the issue that drove him to the brink appeared to be a series of scandals involving his wife, Kim Keon Hee. These included an intensifying controversy over leaked messages between Kim and a pollster that suggested she exercised undue influence in recent national elections.
Opposition lawmakers weaponized the issue, increasing their calls for a special prosecutor to investigate the first lady. The media seized on the issue, with reporters peppering Yoon at a news conference last month for nearly two hours about the recent scandals involving the first lady.
Yoon also became increasingly frustrated with what he believed was election fraud being committed by the National Election Commission, even though a months-long police investigation earlier this year had already concluded that there was no such evidence. But those election conspiracy theories, originating from far-right YouTube channels, likely contributed to Yoon’s motivation in declaring martial law, experts say.
It now appears Yoon had been considering martial law as an option for some time before the actual declaration. On Thursday, Yoon said he had consulted only with Kim Yong-hyun, his defense minister who resigned in disgrace last week and has since been arrested, before deciding to move forward with the decree.
The former defense minister’s role has raised questions about the role of a small group of loyal advisers to Yoon — the “Chungam faction,” named after the high school that Yoon and his former defense minister both attended — and the role they played in reinforcing his instincts.
In the end, the martial law order proved too much for even some members of his own party, who believed it was no longer tenable to support a president who had lost the faith of the public following his martial law decision. Yoon stuck to his guns this week, challenging lawmakers to impeach him or arrest him — a move that may have backfired as some of his own party supported the impeachment.
Even some conservatives who had backed Yoon’s presidential bid could not stand by him any longer.
“The tragic ending of President Yoon Suk Yeol is his personality,” said Kim Jin, a conservative commentator and early supporter of Yoon, explaining to thousands of YouTube followers why he was supporting the president’s impeachment. “His arrogance, his inability to listen to others, and his emotional response manifested in this enormous, unimaginable, abnormal act called martial law.”