It has been a contentious 24 hours in South Korean politics after impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol narrowly avoided arrest for rebellion on Friday, a month after his declaration of martial law.
It’s the latest development in a months-long political meltdown that has not only thrown Korean politics into turmoil but brought to the surface the country’s deep political polarization, most dramatically evidenced by a struggling protest movement — one calling for Yoon’s ouster and arrest, and a smaller but still vocal one that trying to protect him.
The crisis took a dramatic new turn on Friday when officials from the Corruption Investigation Bureau (CIO) attempted to enter Yoon’s residence to arrest him for his Dec. 3 declaration of martial law — and a possible coup attempt. Although many South Koreans took to the streets to demand the arrests, counter-protesters blocked the road leading to the presidential palace and used social media to insist the arrests were illegal.
CIO officials eventually called off the attempt to detain Yoon after his presidential security unit, aided by military personnel, blocked the CIO’s entrance to the palace.
“Regarding today’s execution of the arrest warrant, it was determined that execution was effectively impossible due to the ongoing impasse,” the CIO said in a statement. “Concern for the safety of personnel at the site led to the decision to halt the execution.”
However, that doesn’t mean Yoon’s troubles are over; he is on trial at South Korea’s Constitutional Court — which will ultimately decide whether the indictment stands and Yoon is permanently removed from power — and the arrest warrant is still valid until Monday. If he is detained, he will be the first South Korean president to be arrested. (While Yoon has not yet been removed from office, the acting president has been serving since the National Assembly’s Dec. 14 vote on his impeachment.)
The intensity and volatility of the past month means it’s unclear what’s next for South Korea. But as Friday’s unrest underscored, whatever the fate of Yoon’s political career, the future is likely to revolve around the divide between the country’s two main political parties: Yoon’s conservative People Power Party and the more liberal Democratic Party.
When Yoon declared martial law, he was in the second year of his five-year term (South Korean presidents can only serve one term). During his tenure, his approval rating fell below 20 percent as his political agenda stalled in South Korea’s legislature, the National Assembly, which is controlled by the center-left Democratic Party.
According to Celeste Arrington, a professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and director of the George Washington Institute for Korean Studies, Yoon is “definitely unpopular and frustrated by his inability to make policy.”
“Yoon is the first president in democratic South Korea to govern without his party in the majority in the National Assembly, so he has been stymied in all of his legislative initiatives by a National Assembly that is completely at odds with his ideas,” Arrington said in an interview in December Vox.
These frustrations appear to have contributed to Yoon’s decision to declare martial law, which he first announced in a televised statement in which he claimed, without evidence, that the opposition party to his government was in the midst of an “insurgency” and was “trying to overthrow free democracies.”
The move to declare martial law — South Korea’s first since 1980 — surprised Yoon’s political opponents and allies, as well as the South Korean public and the world.
In theory, South Korea’s constitution allows the president to declare martial law under certain “states of national emergency” – but Yoon appears to have overstepped that authority and also deployed troops to try to prevent the National Assembly from convening. In the end — after some lawmakers were forced to scale the walls to enter the assembly building — the body voted unanimously to decree martial law.
Yoon’s declaration was almost universally unpopular in South Korea and reignited fears of the country’s repressive 20th-century dictatorship, which only ended in the 1980s after mass demonstrations demanding democracy and direct presidential elections. Decades later, South Korean citizens showed up in their thousands to protest Yoon’s move and demand his ouster.
The end of Yoon’s term would not solve South Korea’s political problems
While the past month has been extraordinary in South Korean politics, it also highlights underlying tensions in the country’s politics, which have been defined in recent years by high levels of polarization between the two main political parties and their supporters.
“Over the course of every election that’s happened in the last few years, it’s either gone from very conservative to very liberal, recently very conservative,” Emma Whitmyer, senior program director at the Asia Society Policy Institute, told Vox.
Both progressives and conservatives claim to protect democracy. But what conservatives are largely concerned with, experts told Vox, is promoting the stability of government — which happens to be a democracy — without ensuring the preservation and use of democratic systems.
The conservative vision, Arrington said — that of Yoon’s party and supporters — is rooted in a post-Cold War conception of democracy as opposed to communism, and is generally focused on “making sure no one threatens the state” rather than ensuring democratic principles remain intact.
The political faction has been “heavily influenced by government propaganda about anti-communism and the North Korean threat,” Joan Cho, a professor of Korean politics at Wesleyan University, told Vox. In their view, “anyone who tries to protest against the government are North Korean spies. They are pro-communist.”
In contrast, according to Arrington, supporters of South Korea’s Democratic Party grew up in the era of pro-democracy protests in the 1970s and 1980s, which became a guiding force in their politics and which they passed on to the younger generation.
“I think the disputes and concerns around stability (have) to do with polarization, both at the elite level and at the mass level,” Cho said. “I think it was first apparent with the impeachment of (former President Park Geun-hye) — it was more apparent on a mass level because of these pro-impeachment and anti-impeachment protests that were going on.”
At the mass level, polarization is expressed through South Korea’s strong protest culture; at the elite level, it looks like the kinds of legislative challenges Yoon experienced with the Democratic Party-controlled National Assembly.
According to Whitmyer, Yoon’s indictment — in addition to Park, who was indicted in December 2016 and removed the next year — created a sense of frustration with the system, even though Yoon’s actions were also highly unpopular.
“It’s starting to feel like (one indictment) was one thing, but now it’s happened over and over again,” Whitmyer said. “Whoever is the next president, whether liberal or conservative, they will face many of the same challenges from the opposition who want to impeach them, whether for legitimate reasons or perhaps for more petty or smaller claims. ?”
A sense of chaos and ineffectiveness has fueled distrust of the government, but experts say there is no clear path for reform to allow political compromise to re-emerge – and it may not go well going forward.
According to Whitmyer, “The pendulum seems to have swung very far in either direction (and) there is really no longer a middle ground for both sides to work together.