Cogito Ergo Non Serviam
South Korea Under Martial Law, Briefly
The President of the Republic of Korea (South Korea in the vernacular), Yoon Suk Yeol, decided to put the country under martial law yesterday. It was the first time democracy had been suspended since 1979. The president said he was taking away democracy and civil liberties to combat pro-North Korean influences and anti-state actors. He declared the National Assembly, which is controlled by the opposition, to be a "den of thieves." All would have been well had the people simply accepted their fates. Instead, they took to the streets, the National Assembly voted against the declaration (190-0) and after six hours, the president backed down. He is now facing calls for his resignation and the threat of impeachment.
President Yoon won his office in 2022, but in April of this year, the opposition won the parliamentary elections. This means that the president got none of his programs through. The best the hard-right president could do was veto bills the assembly passed. He found that frustrating.
Moreover, he appears to be so crooked he has to screw his trousers on in the morning. The BBC details the scandals that befell him:
In late 2022, he was criticised for his government's response to the horrific crowd crush during Halloween, which killed 159 young people in Seoul.
Then there were calls to investigate his wife after she was caught accepting a Dior handbag as a gift -- a scandal that is always hovering close to the headlines.
In April this year, his party was defeated in parliamentary elections, leaving him in a lame-duck position. This week alone he has been locked in a political battle with opposition lawmakers over the country's budget.
The Beeb added:
This week, the opposition slashed the budget the government and ruling party had put forward -- and the budget bill cannot be vetoed.
Around the same time, the opposition was moving to impeach cabinet members, mainly the head of the government audit agency, for failing to investigate the first lady.
The media and chatterati are claiming that this is proof positive that South Korea has strong democratic institutions. That is only part of the story. It also has people in those institutions willing to protect democracy. The people who are now in their 60s and older remember the martial law era and the dictatorship that goes back to the country's founding after World War II. They were not about to go back.
What is next? One expects that the president will be unemployed quite soon. If he has any sense, he will resign and go into exile. If he decides to stay and fight impeachment, the crisis will bleed out over weeks and months, none of which benefits the president nor the country. However, one cannot rule out human stubbornness as a reason for him to stay on.
The longer-term effect of this six hours of authoritarian rule is probably going to be a swing away from the right. While the president's term does not end until 2027, it is almost inevitable that the president's People Power Party will lose support while the opposition Democratic Party will gain. Of course, 2027 is a long way off, a political eternity. Making that shift of support work now will be a challenge for the opposition.
That can be done as the constitution allows the Prime Minister to govern for a short time if the presidency is vacant. A new president must be elected within 70 days of the vacancy occurring. The Democratic Party should be in control of the presidency before March.
© Copyright 2024 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.
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