Not so long ago few ordinary South Koreans could tell you much about their president, Yoon Suk Yeol, a former prosecutor general who made his name by helping to impeach and convict his corrupt predecessor Park Geun-hye.
The jailing of Park in 2018 made the apparently incorruptible Yoon a symbol of justice. So there is some irony in the fact that Yoon has himself been impeached and is now at the centre of South Korea’s worst constitutional crisis in decades.
Yoon (63) has defied repeated summonses to explain his late-night martial law decree on December 3rd and has barricaded himself behind his security team at the newly fortified presidential residence in central Seoul.
Attempts to arrest him last weekend failed after a confrontation with presidential guards. A court on Tuesday extended the arrest warrant but police have declined to execute it, saying it should be done by anti-corruption investigators.
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Yoon’s adversaries have accused his presidential security service of acting like a private militia in a banana republic. His lawyers retort that investigators have no authority to detain him on charges of insurrection.
[ Blinken expresses confidence in South Korean democratic processOpens in new window ]
The standoff between executive and judicial powers finds clear echoes in US politics, where supporters of Donald Trump have long accused his opponents in the courts and “deep state” of overstepping their authority.
In a nod to this comparison, Yoon’s supporters have taken to rallying outside his residence waving US flags and “Stop the Steal” banners, adopting the slogan popularised by Trump who falsely claims he won the 2020 US presidential election.
Some in Yoon’s camp have told the media they hope Trump, who has also repeatedly snubbed the courts and sided with political strongmen, will come to his aid after his inauguration in Washington on January 20th.
Yoon justified the imposition of martial law partly with baseless claims that he was defrauded in 2020 parliamentary elections.
He cited “anti-state forces” acting on behalf of Stalinist North Korea in his decree, calling South Korea’s parliament “a den of criminals ... planning the overthrow of our liberal democratic order,” and pledging to “eradicate unscrupulous pro-Pyongyang forces”.
Like Trump, Yoon accuses journalists in the mainstream media of liberal bias and has acknowledged the information battle waged by his online supporters, many of whom also trade in conspiracy theories.
“I am watching on YouTube live all the hard work you are doing,” he wrote to them last week, pledging to “fight until the end to protect this country together with you”.
The mainstream media has in turn pounced on stories of Yoon’s private life, particularly claims that his judgment has been impaired by heavy drinking and addiction to online websites that amplify his claims.
“Conservatives as a whole have succumbed to a conspiracy-based worldview,” political commentator Jeong Kyu-jae wrote about Yoon in the left-leaning Hankyoreh newspaper following the martial-law decree.
Many Koreans speculate that the December 6th plan originated with the so-called “Choongam clique”, named after a posh fee-paying high school in the Seoul suburbs. Yoon and his fellow plotters, the former defence minister, head of military intelligence and interior minister, are all graduates of the school.
The head of the school was so infuriated by this speculation that she felt the need to issue a statement, calling Yoon and former defence minister Kim Yong-hyun “Choongam’s most embarrassing alumni a million times over”.
Claims of a plot by Yoon and his core advisers, and rumours that military officers were offered inducements to join, have alarmed Koreans with memories of previous coups d’etat in 1961 and 1979, which both originated in secret military societies.
This is one reason why public opinion remains strongly against Yoon, though he is popular with older Koreans and young men, who made up more than half of the voters who backed him in 2022.
By contrast, the demographic of mass street protests against the defrocked president remains strongly female, with thousands of women in their 20s and 30s waving light sticks and singing K-pop songs.
K-pop lyrics have become the de facto soundtrack to the protest moment. The most famous is Girls’ Generation’s Into The New World, which includes the lines: “Don’t wait for any special miracle. The rough path in front of us might be an unknown future and challenge, but we can’t give up.”
It remains to be seen which side will give up first, or the impact of Trump’s presidency. For now, Yoon appears to be digging in for a fight.
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