A Long Six Hours

Yoon’s plot proved to be poorly conceived. However, during the longest six hours in recent Korean memory, he came alarmingly close to achieving his aim, despite procedural safeguards embedded in the 1987 constitution to prevent coups as part of the country’s democratization efforts.

The president showed that he could bypass a constitutionally mandated cabinet resolution to declare martial law. He could use his loyalist defense secretary to deploy elite forces to the legislature. Special warfare soldiers rappelled down into the National Assembly hall from military helicopters and smashed windows, forcing their way inside. Their mission was to apprehend legislature leaders, regardless of their party affiliation.

This marked the first time in Korean history — scarred by three military coups — that soldiers involved in a coup attempt set foot in the assembly to arrest lawmakers or block a vote. In their own time, the military generals Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan merely cordoned off the assembly hall.

However, there was a crack in the state bureaucracy. A total of 190 out of 300 lawmakers, including some from Yoon’s ruling People Power Party (PPP), unanimously voted to override the declaration of martial law because police did not block their entry before military reinforcements arrived. Above all, Yoon was left with little option but to cave in as tens of thousands of protesters spontaneously flooded the streets of Seoul in defiance of his attempt to turn back the clock on their hard-won democracy.

Limits to Democracy

Yoon’s rule is effectively finished with mass protests looming and a national strike called by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), the country’s largest labor union federation. The only question that remains is whether he will face impeachment or step down voluntarily.

Upon his inauguration three years ago, Yoon’s five year, single-term presidency was quickly consumed by a series of crises, including mismanagement of mass accidents and scandals involving his intrusive wife, Kim Keon-hee, who even meddled in cabinet appointments and other presidential affairs. Since gaining a solid majority in the latest legislative election in April, the opposition DPK, together with other minor parties, have been intensifying calls for his impeachment, driven by Yoon’s poor approval rates, which have never surpassed 25 percent.

However, with its leader and former presidential candidate, Lee Jae-myung, entangled in his own legal plight over corruption and influence peddling, the DPK has not been able to capitalize on Yoon’s unpopularity. Its approval ratings remain merely a few percentage points ahead of Yoon’s PPP.

The two major parties have been engaged in bickering, seeking respectively to protect the first lady and the opposition leader. Yoon has vetoed twenty-one partisan bills, including one proposing a special prosecutor to investigate his wife. Meanwhile, the DPK has routinely used its majority vote to impeach prosecutors and judges responsible for cases against its leader Lee and other senior government officials. In announcing martial law, Yoon expressed his frustrations: “By intimidating judges and impeaching multiple prosecutors, they have paralyzed judicial operations.”

The government and opposition could often set their acrimony aside when it came to safeguarding the interests of the corporate and financial elite. The PPP and the DPK recently agreed to scrap the capital gains tax on stock transactions for the wealthiest 0.9 percent of investors. Lee, who strongly opposed his rival’s campaign pledge to extend working hours, has since said that the mandated fifty-two-hour workweek should be applied flexibly — despite the fact that average South Korean workers already put in 149 more hours a year than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 1,752 hours.

For several months, the DPK has been attempting to replicate the mass rallies that led to the impeachment of another corrupt president, Park Geun-hye, in 2017. However, its continued prioritization of corporate interests over the bread-and-butter issues affecting the working and middle classes has thus far hampered its ability to gain momentum, despite Yoon’s chronic incompetence and corruption. Yoon likely misinterpreted the lack of traction for DPK-led protests, combined with public cynicism and apathy, as an opportunity to use martial law to crush the opposition.

The Rise and Fall of Prosecutorial Dictatorship

Yoon underestimated the resilience of South Korean democracy, and the spontaneity of the masses, which was once again on full display as people almost instinctively took to the streets following the imposition of martial law. However, the rise of Yoon, who depicted himself as an anti-corruption crusader, to the presidency laid bare the long-running vulnerabilities of South Korea’s version of democracy, now often touted as “K-democracy” following a number of milestones.

Yoon could leap to the presidency just three months after launching his bid for the office, a feat made possible by the overarching influence of the prosecution office on South Korean society, where it enjoys both unchecked investigative powers and prosecutorial exclusivity. In the early 1990s, when the country began to undergo its sinuous process of democratization, the ubiquitous authority of the office meant that it took over politically sensitive and shadowy tasks previously handled by the intelligence agency, whose omnipotence had been curbed by democratic reforms.

The pivotal period for this handover was April to May of 1991 when South Koreans poured into the streets to demand the removal from office of Roh Tae-woo — the former general handpicked by his 1980 coup coconspirator and predecessor, Chun Doo-hwan — following the beating and killing of a student protester by riot police. From the onset, tens of thousands of students and labor activists staged large-scale street protests.

However, ordinary citizens stayed on the sidelines, in a stark contrast to the events of four years previously, in June 1987, when they joined student-led demonstrations, securing free elections and a new constitution. Political complacency was prevalent, especially among the urban middle class even as the country witnessed another former military general assuming the presidency through ostensibly free elections. By 1990, Roh had further cemented his power by creating a megaconservative party through a three-way merger with two opposition parties.

Yet student protests did not appear to wane on their own. Within about a month, a total of nine activists had resorted to self-immolation in a desperate attempt to keep the demonstrations going. It was South Korea’s prosecution office that ended the standoff. In mid-May 1991, prosecution authorities arrested Kang Ki-hun, a former student activist and member of a dissident group, accusing him of abetting the earlier self-immolation of his comrade.

The prosecutors alleged that Kang wrote a suicide note for his comrade and encouraged him to end his own life in protest against Roh. They went on to paint the protest movement as a far-left provocation, willing to exploit the dead in its bid to overthrow the democratically elected government. It later turned out that prosecutors had doctored handwriting analyses to put Kang in jail, yet no formal apology has been offered.

In this way, the prosecution office emerged as an all-powerful fixer for the president. Since then, all presidents, conservative or liberal, have weaponized prosecutorial powers to eliminate or humiliate their rivals and silence opposition. These practices have cumulatively led to the point that a bloated prosecution finally catapulted its own chief to the presidency after thwarting intermittent attempts to curtail its powers. In retrospect, Yoon’s seizure of the presidency represented the culmination of a rolling coup, thirty-three years in the making, from one of South Korea’s last bastions of authoritarianism.

A Great Day for Democracy

December 3 will likely go down in history as a great day for democracy not just in South Korea, but across the world, due to a combination of popular vigilance and pure luck that kept the constitutional order intact. South Koreans have now been offered a once-in-a-generation opportunity to renew the vibrancy of their democracy.

Much of their democratic future will depend on whether they can ditch the form of pro-business bipartisan politics that has proved vulnerable to the rise of an asinine wannabe strongman like Yoon, who initially used populist language to paint himself as an outsider disrupting establishment politics and later showed an unbridled willingness to weaponize the state apparatus against his own people to perpetuate his rule. In other words, their future hinges on whether they can build a meaningful left alternative to the status quo.