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Crisis in Seoul

Yet the crisis escalated after the National Assembly, controlled by the opposition Democratic Party (DPK), impeached Yoon on December 14, voting to open an investigation into whether the president had committed insurrection and treason. Despite being summoned three times for questioning, Yoon barricaded himself in the presidential residence and refused to surrender. Authorities issued an arrest warrant for Yoon, but the presidential security service turned back a police raid to detain Yoon. On January 15, police used wire cutters and ladders to break through the fortifications surrounding the residence and finally took Yoon into custody.

The political standoff turned violent after Yoon’s arrest. On January 18, during his first court appearance, more than 20 of his supporters unlawfully entered the courthouse, assaulting police officers and journalists. Forty people were arrested. That night, about 50 more of his backers broke into the courthouse, clashed with police, vandalized offices throughout the building, and tried to light the courthouse on fire.

These dramatic events appear to have worsened the country’s political polarization. About three-quarters of South Koreans continue to reject Yoon’s declaration of martial law and approve of his impeachment—but public opinion splits along sharp, partisan lines on the question of whether Yoon committed any crimes. And hundreds of thousands of supporters of the PPP and the DPK have regularly turned up for demonstrations either for or against Yoon. Just how well is South Korea’s democracy holding up?

Stephan Haggard is the director emeritus of the Korea-Pacific Program at the University of California San Diego and research director for global governance at the University of California Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation. Haggard says the status of the country’s democracy is uncertain—and largely depends on how you end up defining democracy.

From one perspective, the country’s institutions have held up well since Yoon’s attempted power grab. The National Assembly checked the power of the executive, the independent judiciary investigated the president, and the military didn’t take sides. But if you judge the health of a democracy by measures like political polarization, respect for political rivals, and rejection of political violence, then South Korea’s democracy looks a lot more unstable. And historically, countries that have experienced a breakdown in democracy were often polarized in just the way that South Korea is today …

• “Since South Korea became a democracy, the same party has controlled the presidency and the legislature nearly all the time—but the opposition Democratic Party has controlled the National Assembly since last April. Yoon hasn’t been able to act on much of his agenda since then—and the parties were becoming more and more polarized even before then.”
• “The fact that [Yoon] was a prosecutor in a previous impeachment just doesn’t fit with him declaring martial law. Those two things just can’t be reconciled. You’d think he would know better. You’d think that would constrain him from even thinking about it. It really underscores what a complete surprise Yoon’s declaration was. No one expected this. A couple of legislators from the Democratic Party had suggested the possibility, and they were mocked for it.”
• “This happens pretty regularly when there’s a crisis between North and South Korea: short-run negative effects on the market and the currency that are usually transient and insignificant. But the effects of the economy on the political situation are much more complicated. Economic inequality is increasing, and people who don’t work for big-name companies or the government are facing intense competition and living in a lot of uncertainty. When you look around Seoul, you see that people at the bottom of the social ladder are struggling, and there’s a lot of political pressure for greater redistribution of the country’s economic wealth. There’s been a serious discussion in South Korea about some kind of universal basic income.”

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• Just after midnight on February 4, the U.S. imposed a 10 percent tariff on all goods imported from China. In response, Beijing levied tariffs on U.S. imports of oil, natural, gas, coal, cars, and trucks, and announced an antitrust investigation into Google: “Addressing reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump maintained that tariffs were a ‘very powerful’ means of strengthening the U.S. economically and ‘getting everything else you want.’”
• Police in Istanbul have questioned the Turkish actress Melisa Sozen on suspicion of “promoting terrorist propaganda” in a French TV spy series in 2017. Sozen played a double agent fighting Islamist militants in The Bureau: “In recent months she has been targeted on social media because her character Esrin wore a uniform considered similar to that of the Syria-based Kurdish militia YPG, designated as a terrorist group in Turkey.”
• Chinese police have confiscated the year-end bonus of the country’s first-ever corgi police dog, Fu Zai, for sleeping on the job and urinating in his water bowl. Per a user on the Chinese social media app Douyin, “Poor Fu Zai worked hard all year only to lose its year-end bonus. I can relate so much.”

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