In the hours around midnight last night, members of the South Korean ruling and opposition parties began to scale the military barricades set up around the National Assembly in Seoul. The barricades had been placed there in the aftermath of a late-night television address from President Yoon Suk Yeol declaring a state of martial law, ostensibly in response to national security threats from North Korea. The move was necessary, said Yoon, to “crush anti-state forces that have been wreaking havoc”.
This is the first time martial law — the replacement of civil authorities with military ones — has been imposed in the country since the coup d’etat of 1980.
Political motivations
Yoon, the right-wing People Power Party candidate who narrowly won the 2022 presidential election against the Democratic Party’s Lee Jae-myung, has had a scandal-prone and deeply unpopular reign.
His politics have been a perfectly sour cocktail of reactionary social views, conflicts of interest, legislative paralysis and authoritarian tendencies. He campaigned on a promise to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, claiming it treated men as “potential sex criminals”, and his hawkish stance on North Korea has diminished relations between the two countries to longtime lows. He has attacked the media and unions, through rhetoric, government investigations and lawfare, while using his power to veto investigations into his scandal-magnet wife.
During Yoon’s time in charge, international observers in several fields have alleged backsliding towards anti-democratic tendencies. His approval rating dropped below his disapproval rating mere months into his term, and stayed there, hitting a low of 19% last week. In the 2024 parliamentary elections, the opposition won in a landslide. At the formal opening of the new Parliament in September, Yoon was not present, becoming the first South Korean president to boycott the event since the country’s transition to democracy.
This week, the opposition slashed budgets that the government and ruling party had put forward — which cannot be vetoed — and was likely to attempt impeachment of cabinet members for the failure to investigate the first lady.
South Korean news agency Yonhap reported that full military decree, which bans all political and parliamentary activities, would also allow arrests without a warrant.
The backlash
It was into this chaos, unable to pass laws, mired in scandal, that Yoon’s late-night promise to “restore order” was broadcast. The backlash was immediate. Protests formed outside the Parliament building, and nearly 200 representatives set upon the building, scaling the walls of the National Assembly to vote down the bill, sometimes with the help of gathered citizens. The gathered representatives used the building’s furniture to barricade themselves inside as they deliberated.
Lee Jae-myung, Leader of South Korea's Democratic Party, live-streamed himself scaling the walls of the National Assembly to bypass military barricades so that he could vote to overturn the President's martial law.
— Adam Schwarz (@adamjschwarz.bsky.social) December 4, 2024 at 3:55 AM
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At 1am local time, less than two hours after Yoon’s speech, the measure was voted down and ruled invalid by 190 votes to zero.
The backdown
Initially the military insisted it would maintain the martial law until it was lifted by the president. And very soon, that’s precisely what Yoon did. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, he returned to South Korea’s screens to concede “we will accept the National Assembly’s request and lift the martial law through the cabinet meeting”.
The barricades around the Assembly were removed to the cheers of the assembled protesters, who chanted for Yoon to step down. The BBC reported on the “sense of disbelief” among South Korean MPs “that Yoon would play such a high-stake game and then back off so easily”.
Yoon has done the political equivalent of veering away from a cliff-side game of chicken; the papers of impeachment are already being drawn up. The main question that remains is whether he will resign before he is forced out.
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