Opinion | The Storm in a teacup, and the demise of Yoon Suk-yeol

By Tom Fowdy

Late last night South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol randomly declared Martial Law. Stating that the opposition Democratic Party was collaborating with North Korea, he vowed on television to effectively purge them. The decision came as he faced impeachment proceedings, with his reputation dogged by low popularity and a series of political scandals, and soon enough soldiers were deployed onto the streets of Seoul and descended upon the Gukhwi (national assembly) building. Yet, much to everyone's surprise and relief, the debacle was over in just two hours as the army failed to stop legislators from gathering at the assembly and voting down the martial law, exercising their constitutional right to do so. Yoon was politically defeated almost instantly and in a corner, immediately repealed the martial law.

There is little doubt this morning that behaving in such a way must surely constitute the end of Yoon Suk-yeol's political career. Although we live in extraordinary times, whereby a man who attempted to overturn a US election returns to the White House, if what we have seen last night is anything to go by in common sense terms, there should be no way back for Yoon. The man attempted to overturn democracy and the rule of law purely to deflect only from his political failures, citing a nonsensical Communist conspiracy, and indeed history is littered with such opportunism, many of whom got away with it at the time, yet that won't wash so much in South Korea while the memories of an authoritarian era still dwell in public memory.

South Korea after all, was never a democracy to begin with, for a roughly half its history the Republic of Korea existed as a right-wing Anti-Communist dictatorship that was fraught with political instability and struggle, with North Korea looming as a convenient scapegoat and bogeyman which allowed large scale oppression of its population. Although its leaders were able to transform the once impoverished country into an industrial and technological giant, it came admittingly at a great cost and it would be at the end of the 1980s that the country finally became a democracy, albeit one that has always been fragile with the legacy of authoritarianism still looming over its Conservative leaders and in an institutional sense, the state being very centralized. Hyper partisanism has likewise, as it has throughout the world, also got worse in recent years.

However, despite this, Yoon's attempt at salvaging himself through martial law was botched and constituted a fatal miscalculation. The narrative of Communist infiltration might have held sway in the 1960s whereby North Korea was in fact more prosperous and powerful, but in today's context whereby the DPRK has zero-appeal to the average South Korean and no influence over the country, it ultimately comes across as laughable, and what you have here is the public shock of a President attempting to compromise the entire democratic system on the whim of his own personal scandals. You can get away with this pettiness and callousness in a failed and fragmented state such as Myanmar or Sudan, but not in an industrialized, highly informed and developed republic like South Korea with a history of popular struggle.

So, what is next for Yoon? It is hard to imagine any other scenario than his inevitable impeachment and likely arrest. His rise to political power was one of shrewd calculations weaponizing his position as the chief public prosecutor, as well as whipping up populist sentiment on feminism, yet what he has done here is truly, truly, hair brained. Indeed, history shows us how leaders often take profound gambles in order to secure their power or to destroy their enemies, absolutely confident in their own "genius plan" for victory only for it to backfire and lead to their downfall, often through hubris and failure to contemplate the consequences, such as Yevgeny Prigozhin's rebellion against Putin, but even with all considered Yoon's must go up amongst the most stupid and bizarre of all time.

Beyond him, there is a small probability North Korea may exploit the political tensions and unrest by doing something provocative just to rock the boat, but they are unlikely to try something extreme. Pyongyang will surely be happy that an extremely hawkish South Korean president who actively rolled back Moon's peace legacy is gone, his incompetence and sheer recklessness being a gift to them. As an English proverb goes, "give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves", and Yoon certainly did.

The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

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