South Korea, explained.
A copy of the Donga Ilbo newspaper featuring South Korea President Yoon Suk-yeol after his short-lived declaration of martial law (Jean Chung/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The plotters apparently gave no thought to how South Korea’s liberal international partners would respond.
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South Korea’s President must resignSouth Korea’s President must resign
Whatever the eventual political science classification of last night’s fiasco in Seoul, President Yoon Seok-yeol must now go. His presidency is no longer compatible with the rule of law and constitutionalism.
If Yoon does not resign in the coming days, he should be – and almost certainly will be – impeached. Not even North Korean provocations along the Demilitarized Zone or in the Yellow Sea have prompted South Korean presidents to declare martial law.
There is no precedent for this move in South Korean democratic history. South Korea threw off military rule in the late 1980s. It is amazing that Yoon thought he could put the military back on the streets when South Koreans take pride in their earlier fight to end military dictatorship.
Yoon’s reasoning seems almost absurd given the stakes: the opposition party dominates the legislature and has stymied his government. Divided government leading to gridlock is a common problem in democracies, and indeed, Yoon’s exhaustion with the relentless, frequently petty opposition hounding of his administration is justified. But martial law is such a wildly disproportionate response, that there is widespread suspicion that this was some kind of coup or autogolpe. Even legislators from Yoon’s own (conservative) party voted against it.
That Yoon does not seem to have thought through the ramifications of his move increasingly seems to be the primary take-away.
Declaring martial law over such comparatively minor issues was almost certain to provoke a huge public backlash, especially given South Korea’s culture of street protest. It is again rather amazing that Yoon and his conspirators did not foresee that.
The domestic ineptitude of this “semi-coup” showed up in its international preparations too: apparently, there were none.
South Korea is a liberal democracy deeply tied to the liberal community of states. Yoon has personally met US President Biden (in 2023), and they appeared to have a good rapport. Yoon has also attempted align South Korea more closely with democratic states regarding Taiwan and Ukraine.
Yet the plotters apparently gave no thought to how South Korea’s liberal partners would respond. They would have almost certainly condemned militarised rule and distanced themselves from South Korea politically and economically. Indeed, the South Korean stock market and currency both initially dropped because of Yoon’s action.
If his intention genuinely was to indefinitely suspend civilian rule, he should have waited for Donald Trump to re-take the US presidency in January 2025. Trump is indifferent to democratic character of US partners and launched an autogolpe himself on January 6, 2021.
If this was a semi-coup, then it was also a bizarre farce. That Yoon does not seem to have thought through the ramifications of his move increasingly seems to be the primary take-away. He appears to have been manoeuvred into this by his defence minister, Kim Yong-hyun. Not even the prime minister knew of this decision. Other ministers and officials have said they learned of Yoon’s declaration on television. Coordination of the police and military’s move on the legislature was poor. In just a few hours, enough legislators got into the parliament that they could vote on the declaration and unsurprisingly, they rejected it. Yoon appears to have had no plan for that eventuality – or how the markets or South Korean partners would respond.
Yoon is a threat to South Korean democracy but thankfully an incompetent one.
About the author
Robert E Kelly
Dr Robert E. Kelly is a professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science at Pusan National University, Busan, South Korea.
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