In South Korea, a Blueprint for Resisting Autocracy?
"After President Yoon Suk-yeol ordered martial law, the legislature voted to impeach him. But it could take months to remove him from office, and uncertainties remain.
On Saturday evening, a week and a half after South Korea’s President, Yoon Suk-yeol, declared martial law and deployed soldiers outfitted for war against citizens and lawmakers in his own country, the National Assembly voted to remove him from power. Two-thirds of the legislative body—including at least twelve members of Yoon’s party—voted in favor of impeachment, as more than a million Koreans surrounded the parliamentary complex, in Seoul, chanting, singing K-pop, and waving glow sticks and signs (“Arrest Yoon Suk-yeol for treason!”) in the shivering cold. “Historically, politics has followed the public square,” Lee Chang-geun, an autoworker and union organizer who travelled from another province to attend the demonstration, told me. “This has been a dangerous situation, but I believe in the Korean democracy, in the basic functioning of the system.”
The impeachment now goes to the Constitutional Court, which could take several months to review it and issue a final decision. “Although I am stopping for now,” Yoon said, in a televised speech, “I will never give up.” Since taking office in 2022, Yoon has faced one controversy after the next. As a Presidential candidate with the People Power Party, he appealed to young male voters by promising to dissolve a ministry that had been created in the late nineteen-nineties to improve the status of women in Korean society. He relocated the President’s office to the headquarters of the defense ministry and advocated for a potential “preëmptive strike” if North Korea were to launch missiles toward the South. As President, he has overseen the repeat prosecution of Lee Jae-myung, his main opponent in the Democratic Party; his appointees were blamed when more than a hundred and fifty people were killed in a Halloween crowd crush in 2022. He and his wife have been accused of receiving favors from a pollster and interfering in a local election, which they deny. A majority of Koreans had been calling for Yoon’s impeachment before this recent, failed self-coup. In the days to come, watchful celebrations and protests will no doubt continue. Those of us in other countries where democracy feels imperilled should pay attention, too.
When I first wrote about the events of December 3rd—Yoon’s late-night imposition of martial law, which he justified with specious allusions to threats from North Korea and other “anti-state forces,” and its quick reversal, ordered by the legislature a few hours later—the overriding impression among the Koreans I interviewed was absolute shock. Older generations lived under the violent military dictatorships of the nineteen-sixties, seventies, and eighties, and young people are aware of this legacy. (The Korean novelist Han Kang explores the postwar period in some of her books; her recent Nobel Prize win has revived discussions of it.) Even Yoon’s sharpest critics could not have imagined that he would go so far. We have since learned that Yoon, a former prosecutor, had outlined the plan with military advisers for several weeks; that he had ordered raids on government offices, in addition to dispatching troops to block off the National Assembly (a failed bid to prevent legislators from voting to overturn the decree, per the constitution); that he had authorized the arrest of a judge, a journalist, opposition politicians, and even the head of his own party.
In the end, the army opted not to obey these commands: they did not make any arrests or fully carry out the raids. They did not use serious force on anyone trying to enter the National Assembly. Some soldiers, when sent to ransack an office that oversees elections, ate instant ramen at a convenience store instead. Three days later, Yoon apologized for the episode, then changed his mind, proclaiming that the opposition was “going berserk” and, despite growing calls for him to step down, that he would “stand firm” and “fight to the end,” meaning 2027, when his single five-year term expires. Many of his advisers and cabinet members resigned. Defense and law-enforcement officials were arrested for their role in the chaos; one tried to kill himself. The top leaders in Yoon’s party quit, leaving it unable to function. “We’re lucky that we were able to resolve this crisis in a peaceful way,” Cha Ji-ho, a legislator with the Democratic Party, told me after the vote to impeach Yoon. “From the beginning, it was the citizens who came out and blocked the soldiers from entering the National Assembly, and the soldiers and police acted as citizens, too. There was a shared understanding that we can’t let this happen, we have to resist.”
On Saturday, Han Duck-soo, the Prime Minister, who is now serving as acting President, vowed to “stabilize the confusion in state affairs and let people return to their precious everyday lives.” Han, who had been notified of Yoon’s intent to declare martial law and failed to stop it, seems to be about as popular as the President—who is polling at around eleven per cent—but, unlike Yoon, he’s a career politician, a known quantity, in a moment of upheaval. One of his first priorities may be to fill three empty seats on the Constitutional Court; only six of nine justices are currently in place, and six votes are required to affirm a legislative impeachment. (Under Korean law, the National Assembly, the President, and the chief justice are each responsible for recommending three justices, whom the President appoints. The three seats nominated by the legislature have been vacant since October, when those justices retired.) The court must hear evidence and decide whether to dismiss or restore Yoon within the next hundred and eighty days. If he is removed, the country will hold a snap election to select a new President.
South Korea has been here before, sort of. In 2004, the National Assembly impeached the liberal President Roh Moo-hyun on accusations of corruption that were ultimately rejected as grounds for removal by the Constitutional Court. Then, in 2016, the conservative President Park Geun-hye was impeached after weeks of demonstrations in response to a series of scandals: she had failed to respond as the Sewol ferry was sinking, in an accident that killed hundreds of passengers, and she had colluded in bribery and shared confidential documents with a shaman-like adviser. The court upheld Park’s impeachment. Both Roh’s and Park’s cases were criticized for being politically motivated. The allegations against Yoon—of violating the constitution and a separate statute constraining the imposition of emergency martial law—arguably amount to “criminal acts of treason,” Baik Tae-ung, a visiting scholar at Korea University and a law professor at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, told me. “People are aware that he directly targeted the heart of democracy, so the seriousness of this protest, the anger, is much greater than what we saw under President Park.” (As a student activist in the minjung movement of the nineteen-eighties, which turned South Korea into a democracy, Baik was imprisoned.)
Earlier this week, a poll found that seventy-five per cent of respondents support Yoon’s impeachment. The rallies, signature-gathering campaigns, and online forums indicate something of a consensus across gender, age, class, and political affiliation. The large presence of young women has been particularly striking. According to Laura Gamboa, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame and the author of “Resisting Backsliding,” which explores the strategies used to oppose autocratic turns in Colombia, Venezuela, and other countries, public participation is essential. “If the narrative around impeachment is weak—for example, with Donald Trump—and the impeachment fails, it can help the leader present himself as a martyr,” she told me. “If the narrative is solid, has strong democratic justifications, and it succeeds, it’s a good way to stop democratic backsliding. In the South Korean context, the narrative that Yoon actually committed a punishable offense is fairly solid.”
Can a democracy be simultaneously brawny and brittle? A single man managed to fling a nation of fifty-two million back in time, toward authoritarianism. Yet ordinary Koreans resisted and a range of institutional backstops held. Legislators scaled the walls of the National Assembly to vote against the martial-law decree, Yoon was impeached, and, late Saturday night, the Constitutional Court convened to start the clock on its review. All of it, together, amounts to a rescue of South Korean democracy, at least for now. “Constitutional courts, federalism, international institutions—almost anything can, under the right circumstances, stand in the way of the consolidation of authoritarian power,” Mark Tushnet, of Harvard Law School, told me. “The problem is, you never know which one is going to work.” In both South Korea and the United States, for example, a civilian—the President—controls the military, which is meant to keep the armed forces in check. “Then comes along someone like Yoon,” Tushnet explained, who is willing to use the military for an unlawful purpose. Or Trump, “who wanted to send troops out on January 6th.” Having a civilian Commander-in-Chief in those instances was actually bad for democracy. The fact that no violence erupted during Yoon’s short-lived martial law, on December 3rd, amounted mostly to luck.
That night, Ahn Gwi-ryeong, a spokesperson for the Democratic Party, tussled with a special-forces soldier outside the National Assembly. At one point, she grabbed the tip of his rifle and yelled in an informal register, as though addressing a younger sibling, “Aren’t you embarrassed? Aren’t you embarrassed?” Baik, the law professor and former dissident, wondered what Americans might be willing to do if similar encroachments on democracy and human rights occur during Trump’s second term. “I hope people in the U.S. will see what’s going on in Korea,” he told me, hours before going to protest at the National Assembly. “We should watch what’s happening here, what the U.S. could encounter.” ♦
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