South Korea’s Constitutional Court has today unanimously upheld the impeachment of President Yoon Suk-yeol and removed him from power. This marks Yoon as the shortest serving democratically elected president in South Korea’s history and follows his abortive attempt in December to declare martial law. The country will hold a special election within 60 days to choose a new president. Lee Jae-myung of the liberal Democratic Party is the front runner after an appeal court acquitted him from a one-year prison sentence for violating election law last month.
If elected, Lee will not only adopt a pro-engagement approach vis-à-vis North Korea but also assume power in a geopolitical context like that of his liberal predecessor, Moon Jae-in. Moon was elected after conservative President Park Geun-hye was removed by the Constitutional Court in March 2017, when Donald Trump was the sitting US President, and when North Korea’s Chairman Kim Jong-un was uninterested in dialogue. Moon was expected to lift inter-Korean relations out of a nadir by means of engagement. Instead, Trump and Kim exchanged nuclear threats and North Korea carried out its sixth nuclear test in September 2017. For the first six months of his term, Moon’s plea for dialogue fell on deaf ears. North Korea’s decision to participate in the 2018 Winter Olympics, hosted in the South Korean city of PyeongChang, was the breakthrough that Moon was looking for to jumpstart his engagement bid.
History may be repeating for Lee. But he will face a much longer way back to inter-Korean engagement compared to Moon.
North Korea now sees much less benefit in talking to South Korea as a means to weaken international sanctions thanks to its profitable arms trade with Russia. Pyongyang also no longer pretends it still supports the “complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula” in exchange for the US security guarantee as it did in Singapore in 2018. North Korea amended its constitution in 2023 to affirm its status as a nuclear power. Two years later, it unveiled for the first time a nuclear-powered submarine.
Trump has likewise abandoned the idea of denuclearising North Korea, and the prospect of North Korea attaining de facto nuclear weapon state status by engaging in arms control talks is growing. As both Trump and Kim have dropped denuclearisation as a goal of dialogue, Lee will have to resolve a dilemma that Moon did not have to face: how to persuade the South Korean public to support dialogue when knowing the end goal of dialogue is no longer denuclearisation.
It is worth noting that South Korean conservatives and liberals disagree over North Korea policy, but they agree that North Korea cannot be recognised as a nuclear power.
If Lee drops denuclearisation as a goal for dialogue, he will have to contend with the growing call for an independent South Korean nuclear program.
Unfortunately for Lee, he does not have much political leeway to push his engagement bid to the degree Moon did. In April 2018, 78 per cent of South Koreans expressed support for a peace treaty with North Korea, giving Moon the domestic backing needed for his North Korea policy. South Korea’s domestic polarisation has worsened since 2017. By way of example, conservative constituents have continued supporting the People Power Party after Yoon’s impeachment unlike the experience with Park, where her numbers in support fell to single digits.
More court drama will also intrude. In 2024, prosecutors indicted Lee for asking a South Korean business to transfer US$ 8 million to North Korea when he was the governor of Gyeonggi Province to advocate for a potential visit to Pyongyang. Lee will face trial on 23 April, and the outcome can shape how any administration he leads will use economic rewards to lure North Korea back to dialogue.
Lee has vowed to adopt a more balanced posture between bolstering South Korean deterrence and talking to North Korea to win more support for his North Korea policy from conservatives. However, if Lee drops denuclearisation as a goal for dialogue, he will have to contend with the growing call for an independent South Korean nuclear program which is mostly stemming from the right of the political spectrum. If Lee does not drop it, there is little chance he could play the role of a mediator between the United States and North Korea as Moon did. Lee has not revealed yet how he plans to reconcile the two extremes.
And there is always the possibility of Lee or another liberal candidate losing the election. Despite Moon’s stellar record of hosting three summits with North Korea, Lee narrowly lost to Yoon in 2022. South Korean constituents may not like a repeat of summitry fanfare with North Korea if it fails to denuclearise the North, or perhaps they simply do not care about North Korea at all. Conservative big names, such as Oh Se-hoon or Han Dong-hoon, support a hardline approach to North Korea, with more investment in the military and an independent South Korean nuclear capability. There will be more of the same the next five years if a conservative candidate wins the election.
The two poles, one between the two Koreas and the other between the two parties in South Korea, will pose the biggest test yet for any engagement ambition. Yoon may be gone, but the road back to inter-Korean engagement will not be a short one.
