With even his People Power party MPs backing the immediate rescinding of President Yoon Suk Yeol’s shock imposition of martial law in South Korea, the president’s impeachment now appears likely. A two-thirds vote is required if Yoon does not make a vote unnecessary by resigning.
Yesterday his whole cabinet, most of them completely blindsided by the president’s move, was offering its resignation, although first in line to go, defence minister Kim Yong-hyun, had proposed the declaration of martial law.
In the history of martial law regimes, Tuesday’s six-hour coup must rank with the briefest ever. But, although its reversal is testimony to the robustness of the country’s democracy, for many startled South Koreans the sight of troops trying to take over the national assembly was a sharp reminder of the country’s relatively recent history of military rule which lasted to the late 1980s. In 1980 a particularly brutal crackdown in Gwangju is alleged to have killed hundreds.
Tuesday’s spontaneous protests throughout the country, demanding not only the end to martial rule but Yoon’s resignation, demonstrated how out of touch the deeply unpopular president has become.
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Yoon, a 63-year-old former prosecutor, took office in 2022 by the narrowest of majorities. His party is a minority in parliament facing uphill battles, often unsuccessful, to pass legislation and budgets. His attempt to tar the liberal opposition Democratic Party along with the North Korean regime as justification for military rule, is taken with a pinch of salt by a population well-used to such claims. Allies like the US – which stations nearly 30,000 troops in South Korea to protect it from the nuclear-armed Pyonyang – voiced deep concern at the declaration, then relief that martial law was over.
Whether an attempted “insurrection”, as the opposition claims, or , as one Korean political scientist put it, an act of “political suicide”, Yoon’s brief attempt to write a new chapter in Korea’s history seems likely to be consigned to its footnotes.