Things fall apart

I spend a couple of days away from my desk (I was at a conference Monday and Tuesday) and sure enough, all hell breaks loose on multiple fronts. The Syrian civil war reignites, entirely falsifying my assessment last year that it was all over. The French government of Michel Barnier totters and ultimately falls, as far left, centre-left and far right unite against fiscal responsibility. And then on Tuesday night, apparently out of nowhere, South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol tried to stage a coup.

So let’s deal with that last matter first, with the hope that we can get to the others – plus the interesting election results in Ireland, Iceland and Romania – sometime in the next few days. I choose South Korea partly because I think that despite the shock and confusion it is, so far at least, a good news story.

For some background, you can read my reports on the last presidential election, in March 2022, and this year’s legislative election. In the latter, Yoon argued that his government was being hamstrung by an unco-operative legislature; as I put it, “the voters didn’t buy this argument at all,” and returned a large opposition majority, 192 seats to 108.

Yoon’s popularity continued to decline, and he faced the risk of impeachment and removal. So he decided on a bold stroke, and on Tuesday made a televised declaration of martial law, without giving any warning to his own party’s MPs or for that matter to the Americans – who maintain a large contingent of troops in the country and might be thought to be potentially important players in the event of a military takeover.

Martial law is a real thing in the South Korean constitution; the president has the power “to maintain the public safety and order by mobilising the armed forces in time of war, armed conflict or similar national emergency.” But an absolute majority of the legislature has the power to overturn such a declaration, and within hours that’s exactly what they did, although some of them had to fight their way past security personnel first.

At that point the president had to decide whether to back down, or to press on and order the troops to disperse parliament by force. As a general rule, it’s not possible to seize power (or maintain it) by force in the absence of popular support unless you’re willing to kill a lot of people. Depending on circumstances, the bloodshed may not turn out to be necessary, but without the willingness to go that far the attempt is almost certainly doomed.

Put to the test, Yoon (to his credit) proved unwilling to start a bloodbath. It seems that either he had counted on popular support, or he had simply not thought through the implications of what he was doing. Perhaps he had come to believe his own rhetoric to the effect that his opponents represented only a minority of radical extremists. If so, he was swiftly disabused; faced with unanimity in the legislature and massed opposition in the streets, he gave in and cancelled the declaration.

The legislature, unsurprisingly, has now moved for Yoon’s impeachment, but with a two-thirds majority required the opposition will need some votes from Yoon’s party, the conservative People Power Party. The party leadership has disowned him but is still saying that it will oppose impeachment; whether it can maintain that position in the face of public pressure remains to be seen.

Readers will probably already have thought of the parallels with 6 January 2021 in the United States. Donald Trump did not actually declare martial law, but it was widely believed that he was planning such a step if the insurrection he incited had been more successful. And his record of admiration for authoritarian rule is similar to Yoon’s; it’s easy to imagine that his aides, if not Trump himself, will be carefully watching what happens in South Korea as a sign of the limits of what might be possible in America.

Although Republican Party leaders promptly condemned the 6 January insurrection, they failed to follow through: only a handful of them supported Trump’s second impeachment, and the majority of Republicans in the House of Representatives still voted to support Trump’s baseless challenges to the election result. Probably this was more a token gesture than a genuine attack on democracy; they thought Trump was finished anyway, so it was safe to give him what he wanted. In this they were quite wrong.

South Korea now has the opportunity to do what America failed to do and make its repudiation of the assault on the constitutional order clear and unequivocal. If it does not, it too may one day face a Trumpist reckoning.