PTI, December 05, 2024, Seoul : Decades of achievement led Yoon Suk Yeol to the pinnacle of political power in South Korea, but his legacy may now boil down 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.
Was there any clue in Yoon’s background that this was coming?
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.
But his time in office has been marked by near-constant friction with an opposition-controlled parliament, threats of annihilation from North Korea and a series of scandals involving him and and his wife. Observers say he has long taken criticism personally and relies the advice of hardcore loyalists, and that he makes impulsive decisions.
As he faces impeachment by parliament, no one thing explains his attempt to shut down the mechanisms of a democratic nation over his still unexplained claim that “anti-state” actors 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 what could turn out to be the defining moment of his presidency.
A turbulent rise to top prosecutor
Despite his three years as president, Yoon’s career has been 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 defining 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 armoured vehicles at the 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 has 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 follow the advice of 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 has been dominated by frustration and acrimony, much stemming from his narrow victory and his party’s failure to win control of parliament.
The liberal opposition’s control of parliament will continue until he leaves office in 2027 after resounding parliamentary election wins earlier this year.
Gridlock in parliament has led to an increasingly tense political discourse.
When Yoon declared the state of emergency, he said a goal was to eliminate “shameless North Korea followers and anti-state forces” that he said were plotting rebellion, in an apparent reference to the opposition Democratic Party.
During Tuesday’s martial law announcement, Yoon highlighted his rivals’ repeated attempts to impeach his top officials and their bid to curtail key parts of next year’s budget bill as major reasons for his declaration.
Claims of corruption have also battered his approval ratings.
Last month, Yoon 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.
“Whether he will be politically dead or not, he tried to massively shake up the political world,” Choi said. “But he failed. He likely … believed there was no other option.”
North Korea has lashed out at his hard line
If political squabbles and scandal have set the tenor of Yoon’s domestic presidency, its foreign policy has been 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. By last year North Korea was calling Yoon “a guy with a trash-like brain” and “a diplomatic idiot.”
And for months now, North Korea has taken 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 control domestic dissidents and political opponents.