A supporter of impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol holds a placard reading “Stop the Steal” as he takes part in a rally near Yoon’s residence in Seoul on Sunday.
Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images
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Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images
SEOUL, South Korea — More than a month after South Korea’s now-impeached president, Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law, the country remains deep in political crisis.
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The one-month mark since the Dec. 3 martial law decree came just ahead of Monday’s fourth anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021. Analysts are examining both instances — however different — as examples of self-inflicted wounds to democracy, and mining them for lessons about how to prevent them from recurring.
Challenges to democracy in South Korea and the U.S.
The South Korean and U.S. examples have clear differences. The attack on the U.S. Capitol four years ago was an attempt to overturn election results. Yoon’s martial law decree was aimed at breaking the resistance of an opposition-controlled parliament.
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But “the essential feature of the action is similar,” argues Aurel Croissant, a political scientist at Heidelberg University in Germany. He says both moments were attempts— whether from a sitting executive or his supporters — “to prevent another branch of government from performing its constitutional duties and holding the government accountable.”
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Political scientists call this a “self-coup.”
“The South Korean declaration of martial law is a textbook example of such a self-coup,” says Croissant, and many see the Jan. 6 insurrection in the United States as one, too.
For many South Koreans, their experience naturally raises comparisons with the U.S. Capitol attack. That includes impeached President Yoon, who argued that he should enjoy the same absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for his official acts that the Supreme Court confirmed for U.S. presidents last year.
South Korean law does indeed grant presidents immunity from prosecution, except for charges of insurrection or treason. Yoon is being charged with insurrection.
At a press conference in Seoul on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “We had serious concerns about some of the actions that President Yoon took and we communicated those directly to the government.”
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But, he said, “We have tremendous confidence in the resilience of South Korea’s democracy,” whose institutions, the U.S. has argued, have held firm.
Resistance to self-coups vs. resilience
Croissant argues that if South Korea’s institutions had held, Yoon would not have been able to declare martial law, even for a few hours.
“South Korean’s democracy is strong in reacting to crisis,” he says, “but it’s very weak in preventing crisis.”
While South Korean law requires the president to notify parliament of a declaration of martial law, and parliament can demand that the president cancel the declaration, parliament has no power to veto it.
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Part of the problem lies in the way South Korea’s political system was designed and built, says Seoul National University political scientist Kang Won-taek.
“The core of Korea’s democratization so far,” he explains, “has been focused on holding fair and democratic elections for president.”
Kang argues that the system has reached its limits, and some of the president’s powers now need to be redistributed. A debate on this issue has been going on for some years.
The “muscle” behind self-coups
Another reason Yoon’s self-coup failed is that the military balked at using force to impose martial law.
One factor in that, Kang says, is the events of May 1980, when South Korea’s then-ruling military junta sent troops to crush pro-democracy protests in the city of Gwangju, killing around 200 civilians. “The soldiers felt extremely ashamed after witnessing the incident in Gwangju,” he says.
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South Korean author Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in literature last year for books including Human Acts, which dealt with the trauma of Gwangju.
In South Korea’s parliament last month, opposition floor leader Park Chan-dae mentioned two of the questions Han raises about Gwangju: “Can the past help the present?” and “Can the dead save the living?”
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“As I experience the civil strife of the Dec. 3 martial law decree,” he said, “I would like to answer ‘yes’ to the question, ‘Can the past help the present?’ Because May 1980 saved December 2024.”
Croissant,the political scientist in Germany,argues that because leaders who stage self-coups often require the use or the threat of force to achieve their aims, lawmakers must strictly oversee militaries and security apparatuses to see that they adhere to the constitution.
The last line of defense
At the end of the day, Croissant points out that South Korea and the U.S. are both representative democracies, where people select representatives to govern for them. When the representatives fail, he adds, citizens must mobilize to protect their rights themselves.
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“Civil society is the last line of defense for democracy,” Croissant says, citing Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel Prize winner in economics.
South Koreans have been mobilizing for over 100 years, Croissant adds, learning lessons from 35 years of Japanese colonial occupation and more than 25 years of military dictatorships.
NPR’s Se Eun Gong contributed to this report in Seoul.
