The past 24 hours in South Korea’s chaotic politics, explained

It’s been a contentious 24 hours in South Korean politics, after impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol narrowly avoided arrest for insurrection on Friday, a month after his martial law declaration. 

It’s the latest development in a month-long political meltdown that has not only thrown Korean politics into turmoil, but surfaced the country’s deep political polarization, evidenced most dramatically by dueling protest movements — one calling for Yoon’s ouster and arrest, and a smaller but still vocal one trying to protect him.

The crisis took a dramatic new turn on Friday, when officials with the Corruption Investigation Office for High-ranking Officials (CIO) tried to enter Yoon’s residence to arrest him for his martial law declaration on December 3 — and possible attempted self-coup. Though many South Koreans took to the streets demanding the arrest, counterprotesters blocked the road leading to the presidential palace and used social media to insist that an arrest was illegal.

CIO officials eventually called off the attempt to detain Yoon after his presidential security detail, aided by military personnel, blocked the CIO’s entry to the palace. 

“Regarding the execution of the arrest warrant today, it was determined that the execution was effectively impossible due to the ongoing standoff,” according to a CIO statement. “Concern for the safety of personnel on-site led to the decision to halt the execution.”

That doesn’t mean Yoon’s troubles are over, however; there is an ongoing case against him in South Korea’s constitutional court — which will ultimately decide whether the impeachment stands and Yoon will be permanently removed from power — and the arrest warrant is still valid through Monday. If he is detained, he will be the first sitting South Korean president to be arrested. (While Yoon has not yet been removed from office, an acting president has been carrying out his duties since the National Assembly’s December 14 vote to impeach him.)

The intensity and instability of the past month means there’s no clear sense of what comes next for South Korea. As Friday’s unrest underscored, however, whatever the fate of Yoon’s political career, the future will likely revolve around the divide between the country’s two main political parties: Yoon’s conservative People Power Party and the more liberal Democratic Party.

How did we get here?

When Yoon declared martial law, he was in the second year of his five-year term (South Korean presidents are allowed to serve just one term). During his tenure, his approval rating fell below 20 percent, as his political agenda stalled in South Korea’s legislature, the National Assembly, which is controlled by the center-left Democratic Party.

According to Celeste Arrington, a professor at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and director of the George Washington Institute for Korean Studies, Yoon “certainly is unpopular and frustrated by an inability to do politics.”

“Yoon is the first president in democratic South Korea to rule without his party in the majority in the National Assembly, and so he has been stymied in all of his legislative initiatives by a national assembly that’s quite opposed to his ideas,” Arrington said in December in an interview with Vox. 

Those frustrations appear to have contributed to Yoon’s decision to declare martial law, which he first announced in a televised statement claiming, without evidence, that the opposition party to his government was in the midst of an “insurgency” and “trying to overthrow the free democracy.” 

The move to declare martial law — for the first time in South Korea since 1980 — took Yoon’s political opponents and allies alike, as well as the South Korean public and the world, by surprise.

In theory, the South Korean Constitution allows the president to declare martial law under certain “national emergency states” — but Yoon appears to have exceeded that authority, also deploying troops in an attempt to block the National Assembly from convening. Ultimately — after some legislators were forced to scale walls to enter the assembly building — the body voted unanimously to vote down the martial law decree. 

Yoon’s declaration was almost universally unpopular within South Korea, reinvigorating fears of the country’s repressive 20th-century dictatorship, which only ended in the 1980s following mass demonstrations demanding democracy and direct presidential elections. Decades later, South Korean citizens turned out in the thousands to protest Yoon’s move and call for his ouster.

The end of Yoon’s tenure wouldn’t fix South Korea’s political problems

While the past month in South Korean politics has been extraordinary, it also points to the underlying tension in the country’s politics, which in recent years has been defined by a high level of polarization between its two major political parties and their supporters. 

“Through each election that’s taken place in the last few years, it swings either from very conservative to very liberal, most recently being very conservative,” Emma Whitmyer, a senior program officer for the Asia Society Policy Institute, told Vox. 

Both progressives and conservatives claim they are protecting democracy. But what conservatives are largely concerned with, experts told Vox, is upholding the stability of the government — which happens to be a democracy — not ensuring that democratic systems are preserved and utilized.  

The conservative vision, Arrington said — the vision of Yoon’s party and supporters — is rooted in a post-Cold War conception of democracy as oppositional to communism, and centers broadly on “making sure that no one threatens the state” rather than ensuring that democratic principles remain intact. 

This political faction was “heavily influenced by government propaganda about anti-Communism, and [the] North Korean threat,” Joan Cho, a professor of Korean politics at Wesleyan University, told Vox. In their view, “whoever is trying to protest against the government, they are North Korean spies. They’re pro-Communist.”

In contrast, according to Arrington, supporters of South Korea’s Democratic Party grew up in an era of pro-democracy protests in the 1970s and 1980s, which has become a guiding force of their politics and which they’ve passed along to the younger generation. 

“I think the contentiousness and concerns surrounding stability [have] to do with the polarization, and it’s at both elite level and the mass level,” Cho said. “I think that first became obvious with the impeachment [of former President Park Geun-hye] — that was more obvious at the mass level because of these pro-impeachment, anti-impeachment protests that were going on.”

On a mass level, polarization is expressed through South Korea’s strong protest culture; on an elite level, it looks like the kinds of legislative challenges Yoon experienced with a Democratic Party-dominated National Assembly.

According to Whitmyer, Yoon’s impeachment — on top of that of Park, who was impeached in December 2016 and removed the next year — has created a sense of frustration with the system, even though Yoon’s actions were also hugely unpopular.

“There is starting to become this feeling that, [one impeachment] was one thing, but now it’s happened again, and again,” Whitmyer said. “Whoever the next president [will be], whether they’re a liberal or a conservative, are they going to face many of the same challenges from the opposition wanting to impeach them, either for legitimate reasons or for maybe more petty or smaller claims?”

The sense of chaos and ineffectiveness has fueled distrust in the government, but experts say there’s no clear path for reform that would allow for a political compromise to reemerge — and may not bode well for the future. 

According to Whitmyer, “It seems that the pendulum has swung very far in both directions, [and] there really is no longer a middle ground for both sides to work together.”