South Korea’s parliament has voted to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol, a stunning fall from grace for a man who rose from political obscurity to the height of political power.
His decades of achievement could be on the verge of crumbling due to a single, baffling decision to send out troops under martial law over vague claims that one of Asia’s leading democracies was under threat.
The impeachment suspends Yoon’s presidential powers until the Constitutional Court determines whether to dismiss him as president or restore his powers. Yoon also faces investigations meant to find whether his December 3 decree amounts to rebellion, a crime that is punished by up to the death penalty in South Korea if convicted.
Yoon, a staunch conservative and longtime prosecutor, went from political novice to president of South Korea in 2022, ending five years of liberal rule that saw failed efforts to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis and a slackening economy.
His time in office, however, was marked by near-constant friction with an opposition-controlled parliament, threats of annihilation from North Korea and a series of scandals involving him and his wife. Observers said he was impulsive, took criticism personally and relied too much on the advice of hardcore loyalists.
No one thing explained his attempt to shut down the mechanisms of a democratic nation over his claim that “anti-state forces” were acting under the influence of North Korea.
But there are strands in Yoon’s background, and especially in the intense acrimony with the liberal opposition and his hardline standoff with North Korea, that help illuminate the defining moment of his presidency.
A turbulent rise to top prosecutor
Despite 2½ years as president, Yoon’s career was overwhelmingly about the law, not politics.
Yoon, 63, was born in Seoul to two professors, and went to prestigious Seoul National University, where he studied law.
A major moment, according to Yoon, happened in 1980 when he played the role of a judge in a mock trial of then-dictator Chun Doo-hwan, who had staged a military coup the previous year, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. In the aftermath, Yoon had to flee to the countryside as Chun’s military extended martial law and placed troops and armored vehicles at various places including his university.
Yoon returned to the capital and eventually began a career as a state prosecutor that would last nearly three decades, building an image as strong-minded and uncompromising.
Prone to confrontation
But he also faced criticism that his personality was unsuited to high-level leadership.
“President Yoon isn’t well-prepared, and he does things off the cuff,” Choi Jin, director of the Seoul-based Institute of Presidential Leadership, said. “He also tends to express his emotions too directly. The things that he likes and dislikes are easy to see, and he tends to handle things with a small group of his own people, not the majority of people.”
During a parliament audit in 2013, Yoon, then a senior prosecutor, said he was under pressure from his boss, who said he opposed Yoon’s investigation into an allegation that the country’s spy agency had conducted an illicit online campaign to help conservative President Park Geun-hye win the previous year’s election.
At the time, he famously said, “I’m not loyal to [high-level] people.”
He was demoted, but after Park’s government was toppled over a separate corruption scandal in 2017, then-President Moon Jae-in made Yoon head of a Seoul prosecution office, which investigated Park and other conservative leaders. Moon later named Yoon the nation’s top prosecutor.
A neophyte in politics
Yoon only joined party politics about a year before he won the presidency, abandoning the liberal Moon after an impasse over a probe of Moon’s allies. Moon’s supporters said he was trying to thwart Moon’s prosecution reforms and elevate his own political standing.
The 2022 presidential race was Yoon’s first election campaign.
Yoon beat his rival, liberal firebrand Lee Jae-myung, by less than 1 percentage point in South Korea’s most closely fought presidential election.
Their campaign was one of the nastiest in recent memory.
Yoon compared Lee’s party to “Hitler” and “Mussolini.” Lee’s allies called Yoon “a beast” and “dictator” and derided his wife’s alleged plastic surgery.
Domestic political strife
Yoon’s time as president was dominated by frustration and acrimony, much stemming from his narrow victory and his party’s failure to win control of parliament throughout his term.
When Yoon declared the state of emergency, he said a goal was to eliminate “shameless North Korea followers and anti-state forces” in an apparent reference to the opposition Democratic Party.
In a fiery speech on Thursday, Yoon again defended his martial law decree and vowed to “fight to the end” in the face of attempts to impeach and investigate him. He called the Democratic Party “a monster” and “anti-state forces” that he argued has flexed its legislative muscle to impeach top officials and undermined the government’s budget bill for next year.
Claims of corruption also battered his approval ratings.
Yoon recently denied wrongdoing in an influence-peddling scandal involving him and his wife. Spy camera footage in a separate scandal also purportedly shows the first lady, Kim Keon Hee, accepting a luxury bag as a gift from a pastor.
Choi said he thinks Yoon likely planned the “clumsy martial law” edict to divert public attention away from the scandals.
“He tried to massively shake up the political world,” Choi said. “But he failed. He likely believed there was no other option.”
North Korea lashed out at his hard line
If political squabbles and scandal set the tenor of Yoon’s domestic presidency, its foreign policy was characterized by a bitter standoff with North Korea.
Yoon early on in his presidency promised “an audacious plan” to improve the North’s economy if it abandoned its nuclear weapons.
But things turned sour quickly, as North Korea ramped up its weapons tests and threats to attack the South. North Korea eventually began calling Yoon “a guy with a trash-like brain” and “a diplomatic idiot.”
North Korea took that trash theme literally, sending thousands of balloons filled with garbage over the border, including some that made it to the presidential compound in Seoul at least twice.
Yoon’s mention of North Korea as a domestic destabilizing force reminded some of an earlier South Korea, which until the late 1980s was ruled by a series of strongmen who repeatedly invoked the threat from the North to justify effort to suppress domestic dissidents and political opponents.
