2024-12-17

South Korea’s Failed Coup Is a Chance to Renew Its Democracy







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South Korea’s Failed Coup Is a Chance to Renew Its Democracy

South Korea’s Failed Coup Is a Chance to Renew Its Democracy
ByKap Seol

South Korea’s right-wing president, Yoon Suk-yeol, failed in his bid to impose martial law and clamp down on his opponents. With Yoon now facing impeachment, the country can root out the undemocratic political practices that made his attempted coup possible.


Protesters call for the resignation of South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol during a demonstration in Seoul, South Korea, on December 4, 2024. (Jean Chung / Bloomberg via Getty Images)



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They said it wouldn’t happen again in South Korea — not after more than four decades during which hundreds of thousands of people were beaten, tortured, jailed, and killed while defending democracy against one strongman after another.

Another military coup seemed to be out of the question until the late evening of December 3, when the country’s conservative president, Yoon Suk-yeol abruptly declared martial law on live TV. He attempted to brand his political opponents as pro–North Korea communist sympathizers, using rhetoric reminiscent of the brutal rule of his authoritarian predecessors.

Within less than three hours, the former top prosecutor’s coup attempt, mimicking the track record of army generals in decades past, quickly unraveled, with a swift vote at the National Assembly that blocked the imposition of martial law. Three hours later, Yoon said he would respect the legislature resolution.

On the morning of December 4, a cabinet meeting was convened to rescind martial law. Later in the afternoon, his entire cabinet expressed its collective willingness to resign, and the main opposition force, the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), set in motion an impeachment bill for the president.
A Long Six Hours

Yoon’s plot proved to be poorly conceived. However, during the longest six hours in recent Korean memory, he came alarmingly close to achieving his aim, despite procedural safeguards embedded in the 1987 constitution to prevent coups as part of the country’s democratization efforts.

The president showed that he could bypass a constitutionally mandated cabinet resolution to declare martial law. He could use his loyalist defense secretary to deploy elite forces to the legislature. Special warfare soldiers rappelled down into the National Assembly hall from military helicopters and smashed windows, forcing their way inside. Their mission was to apprehend legislature leaders, regardless of their party affiliation.This marked the first time in Korean history that soldiers involved in a coup attempt set foot in the assembly to arrest lawmakers or block a vote.

This marked the first time in Korean history — scarred by three military coups — that soldiers involved in a coup attempt set foot in the assembly to arrest lawmakers or block a vote. In their own time, the military generals Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan merely cordoned off the assembly hall.

However, there was a crack in the state bureaucracy. A total of 190 out of 300 lawmakers, including some from Yoon’s ruling People Power Party (PPP), unanimously voted to override the declaration of martial law because police did not block their entry before military reinforcements arrived. Above all, Yoon was left with little option but to cave in as tens of thousands of protesters spontaneously flooded the streets of Seoul in defiance of his attempt to turn back the clock on their hard-won democracy.
Limits to Democracy

Yoon’s rule is effectively finished with mass protests looming and a national strike called by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), the country’s largest labor union federation. The only question that remains is whether he will face impeachment or step down voluntarily.

Upon his inauguration three years ago, Yoon’s five year, single-term presidency was quickly consumed by a series of crises, including mismanagement of mass accidents and scandals involving his intrusive wife, Kim Keon-hee, who even meddled in cabinet appointments and other presidential affairs. Since gaining a solid majority in the latest legislative election in April, the opposition DPK, together with other minor parties, have been intensifying calls for his impeachment, driven by Yoon’s poor approval rates, which have never surpassed 25 percent.

However, with its leader and former presidential candidate, Lee Jae-myung, entangled in his own legal plight over corruption and influence peddling, the DPK has not been able to capitalize on Yoon’s unpopularity. Its approval ratings remain merely a few percentage points ahead of Yoon’s PPP.Yoon’s rule is effectively finished with mass protests looming and a national strike called by the KCTU, the country’s largest labor union federation.

The two major parties have been engaged in bickering, seeking respectively to protect the first lady and the opposition leader. Yoon has vetoed twenty-one partisan bills, including one proposing a special prosecutor to investigate his wife. Meanwhile, the DPK has routinely used its majority vote to impeach prosecutors and judges responsible for cases against its leader Lee and other senior government officials. In announcing martial law, Yoon expressed his frustrations: “By intimidating judges and impeaching multiple prosecutors, they have paralyzed judicial operations.”

The government and opposition could often set their acrimony aside when it came to safeguarding the interests of the corporate and financial elite. The PPP and the DPK recently agreed to scrap the capital gains tax on stock transactions for the wealthiest 0.9 percent of investors. Lee, who strongly opposed his rival’s campaign pledge to extend working hours, has since said that the mandated fifty-two-hour workweek should be applied flexibly — despite the fact that average South Korean workers already put in 149 more hours a year than the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 1,752 hours.

For several months, the DPK has been attempting to replicate the mass rallies that led to the impeachment of another corrupt president, Park Geun-hye, in 2017. However, its continued prioritization of corporate interests over the bread-and-butter issues affecting the working and middle classes has thus far hampered its ability to gain momentum, despite Yoon’s chronic incompetence and corruption. Yoon likely misinterpreted the lack of traction for DPK-led protests, combined with public cynicism and apathy, as an opportunity to use martial law to crush the opposition.
The Rise and Fall of Prosecutorial Dictatorship

Yoon underestimated the resilience of South Korean democracy, and the spontaneity of the masses, which was once again on full display as people almost instinctively took to the streets following the imposition of martial law. However, the rise of Yoon, who depicted himself as an anti-corruption crusader, to the presidency laid bare the long-running vulnerabilities of South Korea’s version of democracy, now often touted as “K-democracy” following a number of milestones.Yoon underestimated the resilience of South Korean democracy, and the spontaneity of the masses, which was once again on full display.

Yoon could leap to the presidency just three months after launching his bid for the office, a feat made possible by the overarching influence of the prosecution office on South Korean society, where it enjoys both unchecked investigative powers and prosecutorial exclusivity. In the early 1990s, when the country began to undergo its sinuous process of democratization, the ubiquitous authority of the office meant that it took over politically sensitive and shadowy tasks previously handled by the intelligence agency, whose omnipotence had been curbed by democratic reforms.


The pivotal period for this handover was April to May of 1991 when South Koreans poured into the streets to demand the removal from office of Roh Tae-woo — the former general handpicked by his 1980 coup coconspirator and predecessor, Chun Doo-hwan — following the beating and killing of a student protester by riot police. From the onset, tens of thousands of students and labor activists staged large-scale street protests.

However, ordinary citizens stayed on the sidelines, in a stark contrast to the events of four years previously, in June 1987, when they joined student-led demonstrations, securing free elections and a new constitution. Political complacency was prevalent, especially among the urban middle class even as the country witnessed another former military general assuming the presidency through ostensibly free elections. By 1990, Roh had further cemented his power by creating a megaconservative party through a three-way merger with two opposition parties.

Yet student protests did not appear to wane on their own. Within about a month, a total of nine activists had resorted to self-immolation in a desperate attempt to keep the demonstrations going. It was South Korea’s prosecution office that ended the standoff. In mid-May 1991, prosecution authorities arrested Kang Ki-hun, a former student activist and member of a dissident group, accusing him of abetting the earlier self-immolation of his comrade.

The prosecutors alleged that Kang wrote a suicide note for his comrade and encouraged him to end his own life in protest against Roh. They went on to paint the protest movement as a far-left provocation, willing to exploit the dead in its bid to overthrow the democratically elected government. It later turned out that prosecutors had doctored handwriting analyses to put Kang in jail, yet no formal apology has been offered.South Koreans have now been offered a once-in-a-generation opportunity to renew the vibrancy of their democracy.

In this way, the prosecution office emerged as an all-powerful fixer for the president. Since then, all presidents, conservative or liberal, have weaponized prosecutorial powers to eliminate or humiliate their rivals and silence opposition. These practices have cumulatively led to the point that a bloated prosecution finally catapulted its own chief to the presidency after thwarting intermittent attempts to curtail its powers. In retrospect, Yoon’s seizure of the presidency represented the culmination of a rolling coup, thirty-three years in the making, from one of South Korea’s last bastions of authoritarianism.
A Great Day for Democracy

December 3 will likely go down in history as a great day for democracy not just in South Korea, but across the world, due to a combination of popular vigilance and pure luck that kept the constitutional order intact. South Koreans have now been offered a once-in-a-generation opportunity to renew the vibrancy of their democracy.

Much of their democratic future will depend on whether they can ditch the form of pro-business bipartisan politics that has proved vulnerable to the rise of an asinine wannabe strongman like Yoon, who initially used populist language to paint himself as an outsider disrupting establishment politics and later showed an unbridled willingness to weaponize the state apparatus against his own people to perpetuate his rule. In other words, their future hinges on whether they can build a meaningful left alternative to the status quo.
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Contributors

Kap Seol is a Korean writer and researcher based in New York. His writings have appeared in Labor Notes, In These Times, Business Insider, and other publications. In 2019, his exposé for Korean independent daily Kyunghyang revealed an imposter who falsely claimed to be a US military intelligence specialist posted to the South Korean city of Gwangju during a popular uprising in 1980.
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What’s behind the crisis in South Korea?
The recent backfired coup attempt has shown the deep cracks in South Korea’s ruling class. But, says Thomas Foster, to understand the crisis, we must grasp the way imperialist conflict has shaped the country and its politics





Monday 09 December 2024 Issue 2935


Around one million people marched in the capital of South Korea, Seoul, last Saturday to demand the resignation of the president

The West holds up South Korea as a beacon of democracy and ­capitalist progress. But last week’s half-baked coup reveals a society in deep crisis.

Yoon Suk Yeol, the right wing ­president, launched the coup in a desperate attempt to break the political dead-lock in the country.

This crisis flows from South Korea’s position as a client state of United States imperialism. Its history is marked by dictatorship, martial law and coups—indeed, it has only been a “liberal democracy” since 1988.

But it’s also seen powerful working class movements that show an alternative to a corrupt ruling class and its US backers.

South Korea owes its entire ­existence to US imperialism at the end of the Second World War.

In 1945 the US proposed that ­occupying Japanese troops south of the 38th ­parallel—an arbitrary line on the map—should surrender to the US. Troops north of the line surrendered to Stalinist Russia.

The two superpowers cut Korea in half and ordinary people there had no say in it. The US and Russia set up client regimes in their halves of the peninsula, both ruled by brutal dictatorships.

When North Korea waged war against South Korea in 1950, US troops rescued the South from the abyss. After three years of war that devastated Korea, the two sides had fought each other to a standstill.

The border was virtually the same as at the beginning. The US backed South Korea as a bulwark against Russia, China and North Korea in Asia. It propped up the dictatorship of Syngman Rhee—and, when student protests brought down the regime in 1960, helped him flee the country.

South Korea’s rulers—and their US backers—bided their time and prepared to launch a coup. General Park Chung Hee seized power in 1961. Through a ­combination of US aid, close ties between the state and domestic capitalist class and ­repression of the labour ­movement, he built up a ­powerful economy.

Park’s economic model meant there was a close relationship between the state, banks and industry. As well as encouraging corruption, it stoked ­competition within the regime.

In 1979, amid slowing economic growth and demands for change, Park was assassinated by a close ally who headed the security services.

General Chun Doo-hwan seized power, declared martial law and went on to oversee a series of massacres against student demonstrators.

His regime collapsed in 1987 amid mass protests—including powerful strikes by workers. But the state didn’t fundamentally change and it remained a client of US imperialism. And since then, South Korea’s democratic politics has seemingly been embroiled in a “revenge cycle” between rival wings of the ruling class.

All former presidents—except one—have either been indicted for corruption, bribery and embezzlement or have had family members arrested for financial scandals related to the presidency. No sooner does a new president take over, they begin prosecuting their predecessor.

The conservative leader Lee ­Myung-bak, elected in 2008, encouraged a bribery investigation into his ­immediate predecessor, Roh ­Moo-hyun, who died by suicide in 2009 while being investigated. Then Lee was arrested in 2018 on charges of bribery, embezzlement and tax evasion. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

His immediate successor was Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s first female leader and daughter of General Park. She was impeached in 2017, before the completion of her five-year term, and convicted on charges of corruption and influence-peddling.

Prosecutors are currently ­investigating Moon Jae-in, president from 2017 to 2022, for bribery.

And they are also investigating Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the main opposition party, the liberal Democratic Party, for corruption. And now Yoon is facing the prospect of impeachment and possible jail time.

This is reflective of the role the ­prosecution office plays in South Korean politics. After the end of military rule, the prosecution service took over some of the pervasive authority of the state intelligence apparatus.


Million people protest to demand South Korean president’s resignation
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It has steadily become more bloated, emerging as an all­powerful fixer for the president, with each president weaponising powers to eliminate or humiliate their rivals.

Under the last government of Moon Jae-in, Yoon was the director of the prosecution service. Under Yoon’s watch, the service expanded its reach to prosecute more than 200 bureaucrats and politicians.

It led to Yoon himself being investigated at one point for arranging criminal complaints against
specific politicians running in the 2020 parliamentary elections.

He won the presidency just three months after launching his bid. It is a feat made possible by the vast ­political connections and overarching influence of the prosecution office.

These practices, along with the spectacle of the opposition leader Lee’s ­corruption, have cumulatively led to the point that a bloated prosecution finally catapulted its own chief to presidency after thwarting intermittent attempts to curtail its power.

Kap Seol, a left wing author, said, “Yoon’s seizure of the presidency ­represented the culmination of a rolling coup, thirty-three years in the making, from one of South Korea’s last bastions of authoritarianism.”

The rise of China has worsened the economic problems and political polarisation that helped lead to Yoon’s decision.
South Korea—between the US and China

Over the last four decades, while staying deeply loyal to US imperialism, South Korea’s economy has rapidly developed and become more integrated with the Chinese economy.

“Many South Korean manufacturers export machinery and semiconductors to China. During the 2000s, the government was saying that it was partners with the US for security and partners with China for the economy,” Munseong, a socialist activist in South Korea, told Socialist Worker.

“Since the rivalry between the US and China has become more intense, the US has demanded that South Korea decouple from China. It’s created a lot of economic pain as South Korea relies on that export market.”

Chinese companies now mount a formidable challenge in areas such as semiconductors, consumer electronics and cars, areas that have been disproportionately responsible for South Korea’s industrial miracle.

“In the economic war between China and the US, especially in the technology race, South Korea has to depend on the US,” Munseong said.

“Because of these factors, Yoon has been pro-US and put forward a US, Japanese, South Korean military alliance. But now, as a response, North Korea has made a partnership with Russia and this has triggered a security crisis in South Korea.

“The security crisis and a worsening state of the economy has contributed to low popularity.

“The two main countries that South Korea exports to are in conflict, posing very severe contradictions.”

South Korea has been a huge beneficiary of the old, globalisation-friendly world order. But with China’s rise and ever hardening US response, it is being forced to pick sides.

The divisions were seen in Yoon’s invoking of the spectre of North Korean influence, as he portrayed opposition figures as “pro-North, anti-state forces”. He was trying to mobilise Cold War language and take advantage of South Korea’s long-standing trauma about the Korean war.

This is the crucial political context in which polarisation and instability is occurring, and which Yoon’s half-baked coup is a product of.
Strikes reveal a militant force—and an alternative to imperialism

There is a force that can pose an alternative to the imperialist powers and South Korea’s rulers.

The years before the Korean war saw workers strike, occupy their factories and set up grassroots democratic bodies. These were repressed by the US and Russia. But industrialisation created a powerful working class that played a decisive role at the end of military rule in the 1980s.

Repeatedly, over the last two decades, South Korean workers have faced repression only to organise and resist with massive militant mobilisations.

For example, it was almost constant mass mobilisation of millions of people on the streets that brought corrupt president Park down in 2017. And that movement began following strikes from rail workers.

Munseong spoke about the current route forward for the working class movement. He said, “Since October the anti-president movement has grown significantly. The main opposition party is the Democratic Party who have hegemony within the current movement and a majority in parliament.

“The party in the past has fought against dictatorships but has also had many neoliberal policies. Because of that, many workers and the poor and those who are militant distrust it.


Million people protest to demand South Korean president’s resignation
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“The mainstream of the anti-president movement is too moderate and opportunistic. We have to argue for the immediate resignation of the president and that should be realised through struggle. All people and workers should come together and the KCTU trade union federation should start a general strike.

“Not all strikes have to call for the big thing of presidential resignation, but even strikes with local demands can contribute significantly to the current movement. Because currently the situation is very critical. Now is not the time to be overly optimistic.”

He added, “On the one side, the conservative People’s Party will be very strong and won’t step back. On the other side, the resistance side, many people know that the movement should not stop here and the president is far from removed.”

“But the leaders of the movement are not as firm as the president’s side. The Democratic Party is a capitalist party and can’t call for strikes or for struggle from below. The KCTU leadership has called for a general strike but whether that will materialise is yet to be seen as individual trade union leaders are wavering.

“We are organising militant workers and because it is an issue of parliamentary democracy, the first response is the streets and the universities.”

As South Korea has recently seen large street movements for Palestine, anti-government protests and feminist demonstrations, Munseong argued, “We are trying to make the confidence of struggle on the streets and universities grow into the workplaces.”
Topics South Kore


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Yi San is with Sebastian Budgen and
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Socialist Worker, the weekly newspaper of Socialist Workers Party has plagiarized my latest piece on South Korea for Jacobin magazine

The following paragraphs are nearly verbatim copies of my work, yet this no-byline article references me only once.
I am not claiming copyright but to assert that credit should be given where it is due. However, credit should be given where it is due. I request Socialist Worker they cite my work thoroughly and appropriately.
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