Late on Tuesday night in Seoul, Yoon Suk-yeol, the unpopular South Korean President facing growing calls for impeachment and resignation, appeared on television to issue an emergency declaration of martial law. All political meetings and strikes were banned; all media would be subject to government approval. The action was necessary, Yoon insisted, because of legislators’ recent attempts to impeach various members of his administration and obstruct his budget—not to mention the ever-present threat of Communist North Korea that had infiltrated the primary opposition party and was “plundering the freedom and happiness of our people.” He used the word “paralysis” again and again to describe the state of his government, which, he said, was “on the verge of collapse,” as grave a situation as actual war. Thousands of citizens and journalists crowded outside the gates of the National Assembly, while a phalanx of military special-forces officers, toting rifles, broke through windows to get inside. Helicopters flew overhead. The images recalled footage from May, 1980, in Gwangju, after the previous time a South Korean leader had instituted martial law—resulting in a government massacre of pro-democracy protesters. Around 1 a.m. on Wednesday, nearly two-thirds of the members of the National Assembly convened to vote to overturn Yoon’s declaration, under a provision of the 1987 constitution that had seemed like a relic, until now: when a majority of the legislature “requests the lifting of martial law . . . the President shall comply.”
While waiting on news of the President’s compliance, leaders of all the major parties, including Yoon’s own People Power Party, held pressers outside the National Assembly to condemn the martial-law decree and pledge “unity with the people.” Everyone looked to be in shock. The defense ministry stated that it would enforce martial law so long as it was in effect, but reportedly backed off arresting the liberal opposition leader Lee Jae-myung, of the Democratic Party, who had lost to Yoon in 2022 and has since been a target of his vengeance. President Joe Biden, who was charmed last year by Yoon’s rendition of “American Pie” at a White House dinner, signalled that the U.S. would not support him in this particular effort, as it had previous Korean authoritarians. The sleepless people of Korea (and jittery stock markets) held on for word from Presidential headquarters—which Yoon had moved to the compound of the defense ministry, next to the U.S. military base in Seoul, after his election in 2022. Around 4:20 A.M., Yoon showed up via video feed. “Based on the National Assembly’s vote, I have called back the military,” he said. He promised to withdraw the martial-law order, but warned his opponents to scrap their assault on his administration.
What to make of these six hours of overnight chaos? Was it a “drunken episode,” as one of my relatives quipped from Seoul? Or was it a performative “happening” or a “rehearsal” for a much more violent coup d’état, as an activist in Chungnam province wondered to me, over text message? It’s a marvel that no one was seriously injured or killed in the confrontation at the National Assembly. If Yoon had hoped that his party and the rest of the Korean government (and maybe America, too) would play along—and that he might thereby ward off removal from office—he badly miscalculated. Cho Kuk, an opposition-party leader and a former justice minister, told the press that legislators were preparing the paperwork to impeach him. Lee’s Democratic Party announced that it would also pursue impeachment if Yoon “does not immediately resign.”
Yoon, who’d made his name in the powerful central prosecutor’s office of the liberal former President Moon Jae-in, had never held elected office before fashioning himself as an extreme conservative and winning the Presidency in 2022, by a margin of less than one per cent. Inside and outside the country, Yoon has often been compared to Donald Trump and others of the global MAGA strain, but his tenure has always had more frightening local resonances. His narrow victory over Lee was bewildering: in the recent history of South Korea, prosecutors were, like the military and the police, tools of dictatorship. Yet Lee was an uninspired candidate, and Koreans were frustrated by rising housing costs and general economic malaise under Moon; Yoon also took advantage of a male backlash to #MeToo feminism. There were many reasons for worry during Yoon’s campaign and in the early months of his Presidency. He called for a preëmptive strike against North Korea; he used the police and prosecutors to attack political opponents, journalists, and unions. His wife, Kim Keon-hee, appeared to exercise undue control over the executive office, and was credibly accused of graft, bribery, and election interference. (They have denied wrongdoing.) In September, Yoon reshuffled his cabinet, appointing a new defense minister, which now seems to have been a way of preparing for whatever Tuesday night was. Might his intended coup—and the social and political response that stopped it—also be a preview, or portent, of a second Trump Administration?
I spent most of November in South Korea and happened to fly back on Monday night. (Bad journalistic timing.) The country I saw was decidedly not on the precipice, as Yoon said in his martial-law declaration—but he and his wife were. In Seoul, Gwangju, and Cheonan, there were banners everywhere demanding “Yoon Suk-yeol OUT!” Rallies against him were held frequently. His approval rate was around twenty-five per cent. There was a sense of pessimism and strain beneath the smooth layers of daily life. A journalist friend described feeling constant anxiety as he went out to report. I met with a lawyer involved in opposition politics who cited Yoon and Trump’s reëlection and the wars in Ukraine and Palestine as proof of a morbid historical moment. Yet he believed Yoon’s impeachment and removal from office to be imminent, given just how much misconduct was coming to light.
We will know, very soon, whether his prediction was correct. On Wednesday, lawmakers in a number of parties brought a motion to impeach, which Yoon’s party later said it would oppose. Several Presidential aides resigned, and international summits were postponed. Large crowds began gathering to demand that Yoon step down. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, the successor to the industrial-labor activists who helped power the democracy movement of the nineteen-eighties, called for a general strike until Yoon is gone, potentially disrupting public transit. (Rail and subway workers were already planning to strike later this week.) It feels a bit like 2016 and 2017, when the mounting scandals around then-President Park Geun-hye, the daughter of the military dictator Park Chung-hee, were enough to draw tens of millions to peaceful candlelight protests. In a sad irony, Yoon himself was one of the lead prosecutors in her eventual impeachment and imprisonment. But many of those demonstrators have since hung back, owing to political exhaustion. But Tuesday night was a mass infusion of adrenaline, if nothing else. ♦
