SEOUL (news agencies) — Dancing and consoling hugs. Wild whoops and anguished screams. Tears, both of joy and rage. Reaction to the court verdict ousting South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol from office Friday was a vivid window into the nation’s deep political divisions, as tens of thousands of Yoon opponents and supporters aired their feelings in downtown Seoul.
As South Korea now turns to elect a new president, that divide is only likely to harden. It will be particularly on display as both sides try to answer one question about the night of Dec. 3, when the conservative leader decreed martial law, setting himself on the road to impeachment and the loss of the presidency:
What was he thinking?
Yoon was confronting North Korea-sympathizing politicians intent on destroying South Korea’s democracy, his supporters say. No, no, liberals maintain: He was trying to deflect attention from corruption investigations of him and his wife. Or maybe he was in the sway of right-wing YouTubers who claim liberals have subverted the election process?
This national attempt to pick through the wreckage of Yoon’s decision to send heavily armed soldiers to encircle the National Assembly will be front and center as a violently fractured South Korea begins a fierce campaign to elect a new president within two months.
Deploying troops to the streets of any democracy is serious. But it is especially sensitive in South Korea, where memories of military rule from the 1960s to 1980s are fresh.
And the move has further exposed the country’s fault lines, along politics, national security, social standing, economics, gender and age.
Division is intrinsic to South Korea’s origin story. The Korean Peninsula was split into northern and southern halves in 1945 by Soviet and U.S. troops, formally broken up in 1948 when both Koreas became independent countries, and then militarily separated at the Demilitarized Zone at the end of the Korean War in 1953.
The fractures will likely get worse as presidential election campaigning gains force.
Yoon’s supporters tend to frame the martial law decree as a crucial tool for a president stymied at every turn by the liberal opposition Democratic Party, which controls parliament.
Kim Min-seon, a Yoon supporter, said it was the only way to deal with liberals blocking Yoon’s efforts to fight Pyongyang’s and Beijing’s alleged campaigns to threaten South Korea’s democracy through cyberattacks, disinformation and technology theft. The Democratic Party has denied these accusations.
“I strongly condemn Lee Jae-myung’s Democratic Party, which is an axis of evil,” Kim said during a recent rally. Lee, the opposition leader, is Yoon’s archrival and seen as the presidential front-runner.
Yoon supporters’ fears are further fueled by false claims about election fraud.
On Dec. 3, Yoon sent troops to National Election Commission offices to investigate alleged vulnerabilities to its computer systems that he insisted could affect the credibility of election results.
Such claims are unsubstantiated and there is no evidence of electoral fraud, but there’s a worry that the specter could undermine confidence in future elections.
“It’s undeniable that we had election fraud, and the president made a crucial decision to expose such massive wrongdoing,” Kwon Kyung-hee, another Yoon supporter, said during a rally this week.
Many Yoon critics see something strikingly different: a leader increasingly in the sway of conspiracy theories that portray him as a victim of a North Korea-sympathizing opposition.
Instead, they say, he was merely an inept politician, unable to work with rivals to get things done.
“The president’s imposition of martial law was a terrible political decision made by a foolish former prosecutor who mistook compromise for surrender and dialogue for interrogation,” said Choi Hyun-seok, a Seoul office worker.
But others see a reason closer to home, accusing Yoon of being desperate to protect himself from corruption investigations.
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