South Korea’s Crisis Is Nowhere Near Over
6 min read
The past two weeks in South Korean politics have featured enough twists to fill a Netflix K-drama. President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, shocking even some of his own advisers. In a late-night session, the national legislature overturned it. A few days later, the besieged president begged forgiveness from his people, while a corruption scandal engulfed the first lady. Legislators voted to impeach Yoon last weekend and suspend his powers, which have been transferred to a caretaker government run by the prime minister. For now, Yoon remains in office; the country’s highest court will decide whether he can stay.
Korea’s national crisis is far from over. Government dysfunction will likely last well into the new year, entrenching the country’s economic and social problems. The crisis also threatens to undo the substantial progress that Korea has made in strengthening ties with the West, and to leave Seoul woefully unprepared to address Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency, with all the dangers he poses to Korean security.
The proximate seeds of this calamity were planted last spring. The opposition trounced Yoon’s ruling party in national elections in April. Since then, Yoon’s political nemesis, Lee Jae-myung, has helped ensure that the legislature blocks all of the president’s bills, including the national budget. (Lee faces corruption charges, including for allegedly funneling money to North Korea, and an appellate-court decision will determine whether he can run to replace Yoon. He has denied any wrongdoing.) Meanwhile, Yoon’s wife, Kim Keon-hee, became the subject of growing public outrage over allegations of accepting lavish gifts. On December 3, in an apparent attempt to crush his political opposition and silence his wife’s critics, Yoon declared martial law.
But Yoon’s decision also reflected deeper structural issues. The Korean constitution allows presidents to sit for a single five-year term, with no possibility of reelection. As a result, about halfway through their tenure, both their own party and the opposition tend to distance themselves from the president as they begin looking for a successor. This process had already begun for Yoon, who took office in the spring of 2022. Alienated and unpopular in the second half of their term, many Korean presidents have sought to clamp down on opponents and consolidate power, with little regard for how the public will respond. After all, they have no reelection campaign to worry about.
That said, even at the height of their powers, Korean presidents rarely have a popular mandate to govern. That’s because, for more than three decades, one-third of the country’s electorate has identified as conservative, one-third as progressive, and one-third as moderate or undecided. Yoon, for example, is a conservative who won election by less than 1 percent and enjoyed no political honeymoon before his approval ratings plummeted. He was deeply disliked long before declaring martial law and apparently saw no other way to reverse his political fortunes.
Presidents are also vulnerable from the start of their term because of elements in Korean culture that promote a zero-sum view of politics. The country’s deep ideological divides contribute to this problem, but it’s also rooted in a concept called han, which is central to many Koreans’ emotional identity. Loosely translated as “resentment for past injustices,” han compels each side to not just beat the other, but destroy it. For example, opposition forces, led by Lee, have ruthlessly attacked the first lady, stirring mass protests and impugning her character. Government forces, meanwhile, are expected to pursue their corruption case against Lee until he’s at least disqualified from running in the next election, if not imprisoned. And in addition to impeaching Yoon, the opposition has opened a criminal case against him for insurrection. Some of these prosecutions may well be justified, but Korea’s politicians are highly motivated to carry them out past the point of reason.
The next step in resolving the crisis falls to the Constitutional Court, which will have final say on Yoon’s impeachment. It has ruled on presidential ousters before. In 2004, the court overturned the impeachment of President Roh Moo-hyun, allowing him to finish his term. More recently, in 2017, it upheld the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. The court has up to 180 days to render a decision on Yoon. Politics will inevitably play a role, as all parties jockey to fill the court’s three current vacancies with friendly judges. If none of the spots is filled, the dissenting opinion of only one judge will be enough to overturn the impeachment and reinstate Yoon as president.
In Korea’s history of political chaos, these impeachments hardly rank. Four of the country’s 13 presidents (including Park) have been jailed. One committed suicide after leaving office, one was shot in the head by his bodyguard, and one was forced into exile (in Hawaii) until his death. Some years ago, I attended an event where I saw three former U.S. presidents all in the same place, and I thought: This could never happen in Korea.
Government dysfunction has cost South Korea. The Korean stock market plummeted after Yoon’s declaration of martial law, and the national currency quickly depreciated. (The stock market has since recovered.) Those who would invest in South Korea now price in political instability, just as they do the security threat from North Korea. Other stubborn problems—low birth rates, underemployment among the college-educated, a doctors’ strike that has effectively halted elective medical procedures—have gone largely unaddressed. Korea’s power brokers are too busy fighting among themselves.
Domestic concerns may soon be the least of Korea’s worries. Trump’s imminent return to the White House will put the U.S.-Korea alliance to the test at a moment when Seoul has only a caretaker government in place and no election scheduled in the near term. Without a permanent leader making the case on Korea’s behalf, Trump may be more likely to follow through on his promise to impose tariffs. He may demand to renegotiate America’s standing agreements with Seoul that protect free trade and cost-sharing for defense. Perhaps more frightening, Trump could remove the nearly 30,000 U.S. ground troops in Korea—something he tried and failed to do during his first term. He might also rekindle his friendship with the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and make a peace deal over Seoul’s head. All of these things could happen very quickly. As one former senior Trump official told me, speaking about the coming administration on the condition of anonymity, “Things will change not just in the first 100 days, but in the first 100 hours.”
With so much on the line, South Korea will need its leaders to establish early contact with Trump. Indeed, that was Yoon’s plan: He was angling for a pre-inauguration Mar-a-Lago meeting last month. But now Korea has no elected leader to advocate for it in the first months of the new U.S. administration.
Yoon did enact some policies that were widely admired, and that linked his country more strongly to the world, particularly to the West. Under Yoon, South Korea improved relations with Japan, advanced trilateral cooperation with Japan and the U.S., joined the Chips 4 Alliance for semiconductor supply chains and export controls, invested in electric-vehicle-battery production in the United States, and supported Ukraine. Now these and other policies will be tainted by his impeachment and subject to partisan attacks, while Seoul likely retrenches on all fronts.
So far, America’s reaction to the political crisis in Seoul has been subdued and cautious; in a statement, it simply emphasized the importance of democratic resilience and rule of law. The European Union was somewhat more forceful, urging a quick and democratic resolution to the crisis, suggesting the importance it places on South Korea’s supply chains and support for Ukraine.
For many Koreans who have known only democracy, Yoon’s declaration of martial law introduced them to the country’s history as a military dictatorship. Instead of a K-drama, the No. 1 Korean title on Netflix earlier this month was a film about the last time martial law was declared, in 1979. Apparently real life—both past and present—supplied more than enough excitement.
