Amidst the carnage there was good news on Friday, with proof that a rogue president can be removed. Not yet where it matters most, but still important: South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol, impeached by the National Assembly in December following his abortive declaration of martial law, was removed from office by the constitutional court in a unanimous 8-0 verdict.
So there will be another early election in what is becoming quite a crowded autumn (northern spring). The election of a new president has to occur within sixty days, making 3 June the latest possible date. Voting is by a single first-past-the-post ballot, with Lee Jae-myung, leader of the opposition Democratic Party, the strong favorite.
Prime minister Han Duck-soo will remain as acting president until then – a previous effort to impeach him too having been rejected by the court – but there seems no suggestion that he might run for the job on a permanent basis. Instead Yoon’s People Power Party will have to find itself a new candidate, which will mean trying to resolve some of the tensions over whether it supports Yoon or disowns him.
And while the coup attempt lent the question an unusual degree of drama, this is fundamentally the same issue faced by hitherto centre-right parties across the democratic world. Do they remain loyal to the constitutional order and their place in the political mainstream, or do they surrender to the hard right conspiracist thinking that Yoon and some of his international counterparts have embraced?
Yoon and his supporters appear to have convinced themselves that their political opponents are not, as all the evidence would suggest, a perfectly normal centre-left party but rather are traitors and enemies of the state who rigged the last parliamentary election in league with North Korea. That last bit might present some awkwardness in terms of alliance with parties that are on Vladimir Putin’s payroll, but otherwise it’s all very familiar, as is the virulent anti-feminism that plays a central role.
It’s that flight from reality, that desertion of the norms that make liberal democracy possible, that now threatens the world with its gravest crisis since the 1930s. Pulling South Korea back from the abyss is not enough on its own, but it’s a start.
As in the United States, the consequences of impeachment extend only to removal and disqualification from office. In a separate process, Yoon now faces a criminal trial on charges of insurrection, due to begin next week. If convicted he faces life imprisonment (or, in theory, the death penalty, but there have been no executions in South Korea this century), and it is hard to argue that his country will not be safer with him behind bars.
UPDATE, Wednesday: The election has now been set for Tuesday 3 June, the latest available date.
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