The Rise and Fall of South Korea’s Yoon Seok-yeol

The likelihood that Yoon Seok-yeol will survive the overreach of his December 3 martial law declaration is rapidly diminishing. On Saturday, the National Assembly narrowly passed a bill of impeachment, with at least twelve defections from Yoon’s People Power Party (PPP) putting the vote over a required two-thirds supermajority. Yoon is now suspended from his presidential duties as the case moves to the Constitutional Court, which has 180 days to rule. In the interim, Prime Minister Han Deok-su will serve as executive.  

What explains the strange events that led the president to declare martial law and rescind it only six hours later? Yoon’s poll numbers had fallen dramatically since he took office, a result of both policy missteps and corruption scandals. Those missteps, though, were hardly sufficient to explain his radical power grab. Yoon’s closed decision-making and institutional factors, particularly divided government, played an important role. 

The extraordinary events in South Korea also demonstrate a broader storyline all too familiar to students of democratic backsliding: how polarization can weaken support for democratic institutions. Although South Korea is often touted as one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies, the recent crisis shows how executives can exploit political antipathy and partisan gridlock to deepen divisions and endanger democratic norms and institutions. 

Yoon’s Spiral of Decline

A distinctive feature of Korean political life is the tendency of presidents to substantially lose public support over the course of their tenure, and President Yoon was no exception (Figure 1). Korea’s single five-year term limit on the presidency may be to blame, as executives quickly become lame ducks. Presidents lose support and room for policy maneuver as political opponents rise, including competing factions within the incumbent party, and eyes shift to the next election. 

Yoon is by no means the only president whose term ended under a cloud. In 2017, Park Geun Hye was impeached and jailed following a vast influence-peddling scandal. After their terms in office, Roh Tae Woo and Lee Myung Bak were prosecuted and jailed for crimes they had committed. But even among this rogue’s gallery, Yoon stands out. His approval rating two years into his presidency—well before the martial law fiasco—was the lowest on record for any South Korean president at the two-year mark of their presidency since the transition to democratic rule.

As his poll numbers suggest—and despite the narrower-than-expected impeachment vote—disaffection is by no means confined to the opposition; it has clearly extended to People Power Party (PPP) voters as well. One driver of discontent is the economy. Despite its world-class firms, economic growth in Korea has slowed, and, as in the United States, voters have struggled with inflation. During the National Assembly elections in April—in which the opposition almost secured a supermajority on its own—the price of green onions became a catchphrase of voter frustration following out-of-touch remarks Yoon made during a visit to a local supermarket. In a country with over 5.6 million self-employed workers, nearly 1 million had to close their businesses in 2023. Three in four self-employed workers make less than $700 a month.

Added to this were policy missteps and failures to ensure public safety, which further undermined Yoon’s political standing. The grim recital includes a Halloween stampede in Seoul that killed 159 and standoffs with medical interns and residents that led to acute medical staff shortages. Controversial statements, including favorable remarks about former dictator Chun Doo-hwan, along with hot mic incidents and poorly handled press conferences, further contributed to the steep decline in his approval ratings.

The president has also been plagued by efforts to investigate corruption charges against his wife, including suspected involvement in stock manipulation and acceptance of high-end gifts. The presidential couple is also suspected of ties to Myeong Tae-gyun, a shadowy power broker accused of trading cash for political favors, including influence-peddling over the PPP’s candidate nomination processes. These charges echo the crimes that brought down the previous conservative President Park Geun-hye: corruption that allowed unelected outsiders to distort the political process. 

Bypassing Democratic Institutions: Yoon’s Authoritarian Inclinations

Corruption scandals and angry voters might spook any leader, but don’t typically lead to declarations of martial law. What pushed Yoon to take that radical step? 

Korea has a presidential system, and since Yoon came to office, he had to contend with a divided government. In announcing and defending martial law, Yoon claimed it was necessary to solve legislative deadlock around the budget, citing a range of specific policy disagreements. Navigating divided government is always a challenge, but ultimately rests on the ability to make the political and policy concessions necessary to get things done across the partisan divide. Yoon clearly stumbled in this regard. Instead of compromising, he relied heavily on the presidential veto and alienated even some within his own party. 

Yoon’s authoritarian decision-making style was on full display during his attempted putsch. Korean law requires that declarations of martial law meet substantive and procedural requirements. Substantively, martial law is permitted when there are “belligerency or serious disturbances of social order that considerably impede the performance of the administrative and judicial functions of the State in time of war, incident or other equivalent national emergency.” It is highly unlikely that the Constitutional Court will be convinced by arguments that such conditions pertained. 

Procedurally, the president is required to consult with the cabinet before making such a declaration. However, reports suggest that the cabinet meeting held just before the declaration on December 3, began at 10:17 p.m., and ended only five minutes later. Yoon immediately proceeded to the briefing room where, with the doors locked behind him, he read his speech declaring martial law, reportedly leaving cabinet members stunned.

Yoon also did not consult with key parts of the military, or the intelligence, security, and police forces, bypassing institutional mechanisms that might have checked his worst instincts. Investigation of this breach of protocol will raise important issues about the security consequences of Yoon’s overreach. It now appears that martial law was orchestrated by a small group now referred to as the “Choongam faction,” named after the high school attended by key figures in the plot, including President Yoon and former Minister of Defense Kim Yong-hyun. Testimonies to date suggest that some preparations for martial law operations were ordered prior to December 3, but few in the chain of command appear to have had knowledge of Yoon’s plans or intentions, leaving key military units off guard. Some lower-level commanders and rank-and-file security personnel showed reluctance to use force in executing martial law orders, but they should never have been placed in such a position to begin with.

The Role of Polarization

Yoon’s personal travails, plus his impatience with democratic institutional constraints, combined with growing political polarization to create a toxic brew that helps explains the shocking martial law declaration.  

According to our research on polarization in Korea, the electorate has not been deeply divided. Voters largely hew to the center: differences on how to handle foreign policy and North Korea have historically been more salient than conventional left-right divides over issues like taxes and redistribution.

In recent years, however, polarization has been rising, expanding beyond traditional concerns like national security to include economic policy and cultural questions such as gender. Polarization has been driven primarily by partisan voters, with increases more significant among those on the political right. According to recent surveys, in 2022, 41 percent of South Korean citizens said they would not sit down for a meal with someone who holds different political views. Another survey from 2023 revealed that more than half of the population would feel uncomfortable if they or their child married someone with a different political affiliation.

Although Yoon’s popularity began to decline shortly after he took office, the presidential election of 2022 was exceptionally close and bitterly contested. Yoon Seok-yeol secured the presidency by 0.73 percentage points, a razor-thin margin, using polarizing rhetoric to consolidate his base. He referred to his political opponents in ways redolent of the “enemies within” language used by Donald Trump during the recent U.S. presidential campaign.

As in the United States, a political culture of “us versus them” divided the ruling PPP and the left-of-center opposition Democratic Party. This created an environment where partisans may go so far as to tolerate, and even support, illegal measures to prevent the rise of a government run by the other party.

In the martial law declaration, Yoon talked about “pro-North Korean anti-state elements” that needed to be “eradicated.” But this theme was not a one-off justification of martial law. It has been a recurring talking point during his presidency. For example, during a State Council meeting in August, Yoon claimed: 

“Within our society, there are anti-state forces operating covertly in various places, posing a threat to the liberal democratic system. From the early stages of a potential conflict, North Korea is likely to mobilize these forces to intensify national confusion through violence, public opinion manipulation, propaganda, and agitation, aiming to foster division among the people.”  

In August 2023, he said: 

“Communist totalitarian forces have consistently disguised themselves as democracy activists, human rights advocates, and progressive activists, engaging in deceitful propaganda and underhanded, immoral schemes.” 

Yet, these claims are unfounded and only seek to incite divisions.  As the data we reviewed suggests, the majority of voters remain largely centrist in their political identities. Polarization has been stoked by political elites, including the president himself. 

Martial Law: A Loss for Democracy

We can breathe a sigh of relief that martial law was ultimately rejected by the National Assembly and the president was quickly forced to backtrack. Moreover, while there were security forces that broke windows to enter the National Assembly and standoffs with legislators and protesters, they refrained from resorting to greater violence—a sign that norms of civil-military relations provide a crucial check on executive aggrandizement. Perhaps most important, while enduring cold winter temperatures, massive numbers of citizens joined peaceful protests demanding Yoon’s immediate resignation or impeachment, as they did under Park Geun Hye. Mass mobilization pressured PPP legislators to participate in the second impeachment vote on December 14, after boycotting the initial vote a week earlier. Once again, as South Korea’s history of strong civil society has shown, peaceful mass mobilization was a key factor in sustaining democratic rule.  

But all is not well. Despite overwhelming evidence that the martial law declaration was unconstitutional, Yoon believed he could cling to power and only narrowly lost the second impeachment vote. The decisive factor in securing enough defections from the PPP needed to pass the impeachment vote was immense public pressure. Yet, unlike the impeachment vote of Park Geun-hye in 2016, when 62 of her party’s legislators voted in favor of her removal, this time the number of defectors was significantly smaller, with only at least 12 voting for impeachment and another 11 either abstaining or casting invalid votes. Many PPP legislators opposing Yoon’s impeachment seem motivated by fears rooted in the political fallout from Park Geun-hye’s impeachment, when conservative lawmakers who supported her removal were subsequently framed as “traitors” and struggled to regain their base. If fears of political fallout for taking a principled stand to defend democracy grow, who will defend democracy next time around?

Korea faces a challenge that Americans know all too well: increasing polarization, loss of faith in institutions, and political disillusionment. In the aftermath of this illegal effort to seize power, political elites on both sides of the aisle need to turn down the political temperature and forge compromises that will restore confidence in government and prevent such political failures in the future.   

Yeilim Cheong is a PhD candidate at UC San Diego and will be joining the faculty of the Truman School of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Missouri in 2025. Stephan Haggard is Research Director for Democracy and Global Governance at the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC).

Thumbnail credit: Republic of Korea (Flickr)