South Koreans are celebrating Yoon's impeachment, but the saga is far from over

It had been a long and at times intolerable wait. But the South Korean constitutional court's decision on Friday to oust Yoon Suk Yeol from office may have restored the public's faith in their democracy.
For 22 minutes, millions of South Koreans held their breath as the chief justice of the constitutional court, Moon Hyung-bae, began delivering the court's verdict on Yoon's impeachment over his chaotic declaration of martial law in December.
With each damning statement, Moon raised the hopes of the crowds outside who had been demanding the suspended president's permanent removal from office.
Yoon's actions, he said, had constituted 'a serious challenge to democracy', adding that the 64-year-old conservative populist had 'committed a grave betrayal of the people's trust' in bringing about South Korea's worst political crisis since it became a democracy in the late 1980s.
When Moon finally uttered the words: 'The defendant president Yoon Suk Yeol is hereby removed from office,' the crowd erupted with cheers.
The ruling sets in motion a 60-day countdown to elect a new leader, the date to be confirmed within 10 days by the acting president, Han Duck-soo.
Political parties are already scrambling to select candidates, with the Democratic party's Lee Jae-myung – a longtime Yoon nemesis – currently leading the polls. Yoon's conservative People Power party, meanwhile, has the unenviable task of selecting a candidate who is untainted by association with Yoon's failed administration.
The national assembly's first impeachment vote in December was an opportunity for the party to distance itself from Yoon. Instead, People Power MPs doubled down, boycotting the vote and continuing to back their embattled leader.
They then amplified what many believe to be Yoon's groundless claims that previous elections, including a national assembly vote earlier in the year, had been mired in voting fraud. The conspiracy theories found fertile ground among Yoon's supporters, who adopted Trump-style slogans such as 'stop the steal' as they took to the streets.
By invoking cold war language about 'pro-North Korean, anti-state forces' to describe his political opponents, analysts said Yoon deepened the political divide in an already polarised country.
Whoever becomes president later this year faces the unenviable task of healing those divisions and rebuilding trust in the democratic institutions that Yoon so casually undermined.
The ruling marked the end of a tumultuous three years for the conservative populist. The former senior prosecutor who had led the case for impeachment against the then president, Park Geun-hye in 2017, now has the same ignominious postscript to his presidency.
Having won the 2022 election – beating the liberal Lee by the slimmest of margins – Yoon was initially admired as an assertive and strong-willed leader, until those qualities were exposed as an unwillingness to compromise or accept criticism.
As he struggled to implement budgets and key policies in the opposition-controlled national assembly, Yoon grew increasingly irritable, targeting critical journalists, confronting striking doctors, blocking attempts to investigate corruption allegations involving the first lady, Kim Keon Hee, and labelling opposition MPs as a 'den of criminals' working in cahoots with communist North Korea.
Human rights activists welcomed Friday's verdict. In a statement, Human Rights Watch said Yoon's attempt to impose martial law had 'posed a grave threat to human rights and the rule of law'.
It added: 'If martial law had been maintained, South Koreans would have faced the risk of arrest and detention without trial as well as severe restrictions on their freedom of expression and assembly, among other human rights violations. The constitutional court's ruling was a decisive step to uphold human rights protections and democratic values.'
Some characterise Yoon's removal as the start of a process to restore public faith in South Korea as a liberal democracy with a successful economy and a culture admired around the world.
Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, said the court's verdict had 'removed a major source of uncertainty. And not a moment too soon, given how the next administration in Seoul must navigate North Korea's military threats, China's diplomatic pressure, and Trump's trade tariffs'.
It is a sentiment shared by anti-Yoon protesters who had gathered outdoors to watch a live broadcast of the verdict. When his removal was announced, they cheered, danced and cried. 'When the dismissal was finally declared, the cheers were so loud it felt like the rally was being swept away,' said Kim Min-ji, a 25-year-old protester. 'We cried tears and shouted that we, the citizens, had won!'
But the saga is far from over. Few believe that candidates and voters in the forthcoming presidential election will be able to put the acrimony of the past four months behind them, while Yoon faces a separate criminal trial on charges of insurrection – a crime that carries a maximum term of life imprisonment or the death penalty.
'If people start refusing to accept any election outcome that is unfavourable to them, the other side will start doing the same,' said Kim Tae-hyung, a professor at Soongsil University in Seoul. 'If that cycle continues, trust in democracy will completely collapse.'

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

NBC News

28 minutes ago

• NBC News

Trump meets with national security team as B-2 bombers head to Guam

President Trump returned to the White House on Saturday to meet with his national security team, as he continues to consider a potential U.S. strike on Iran. It comes as several B-2 stealth bombers head to the Pacific, according to two defense officials, though their mission remains unclear. NBC News' Vaughn Hillyard is traveling with the president.

Times

42 minutes ago

• Times

How Israel could go it alone without US bunker buster bombs

The United States appears to have sent two B-2 stealth bombers to a military base in the Indian Ocean. The decision to send the warplanes, shortly after sending the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier to the region, could be a last minute negotiating tactic or a prelude to war. The bombers, which were probably making their way to Guam or the Diego Garcia military base, are equipped with the capability to use 'bunker buster' bombs which could offer the best chance of taking out Iran's Fordow nuclear facility. However, President Trump is still uncommitted for the time being to offensive action and is talking up diplomacy. If the president is unwilling to use his assets in the region to attack Iran, the question arises of how far the Israelis might be able to go on their own. Several targets, including the heavy-water reactor at Arak and the most important uranium enrichment plant, Natanz, have already been struck. The boss of the International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that the centrifuges there were stopped so abruptly by airstrikes that they have been 'severely damaged if not destroyed altogether'. But other key sites are believed to remain intact, including the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre and the uranium enrichment plant deep underground at Fordow. The first of these (also a subterranean facility) is thought to have been the storage site for the 400-plus kilograms of uranium already enriched close to weapons grade. The second site is home to the most secure processing facilities available to the Islamic Republic. So, what are the other options? Expert opinion seems divided. Yoav Gallant, Israel's defence minister until last year, in an article in the Free Press co-authored with Sir Niall Ferguson, argued, 'only one air force has the power to finish off Fordow … only America can do this'. Gallant, however, like many on the Israeli side, wants to draw the Americans in, and US attacks on this and other deeply buried facilities might turn out to be more a question of delaying for longer than completely eliminating Iran's nuclear programme. Even if America does join in the assault, Fordow's centrifuges, shielded by 80-90 metres of rock, may prove invulnerable to its 'bunker buster' — the massive ordnance penetrator or GBU-57 bomb which is rated as effective down to 60m. Speaking on an Israeli podcast, Zohar Palti, Mossad's former analytical chief, said of Fordow: 'It would be better if the Americans strike there. They truly have the capacity to make the place 'evaporate', and I chose that word deliberately.' The phrasing was chilling, hinting that a tactical or low-yield nuclear weapon might be the only way to ensure its destruction. The idea of a nuclear weapon being used, something the White House would not rule out this week, seems like an extraordinary escalation but might be threatened at this stage as another attempt to intimidate Iran into making concessions. It's fascinating also that the Mossad veteran implied that a deep penetration unconventional weapon was a capability the US has, but not Israel. If President Trump's desire to avoid another Middle Eastern war means he sits this one out, it's possible the Israelis may have secretly produced a better penetrator weapon than its publicly acknowledged inventory suggests. There's also been some speculation — shades of blowing up the Death Star — that Fordow has an Achilles heel, a ventilation shaft that could provide a pathway for a bomb. But so far Israel has not attempted an assault on Fordow. David Albright, an American academic who's spent many years looking at Iranian nuclear sites, is one of those who's more upbeat about the chances of putting it out of action, saying 'Israel doesn't need the United States to come in with bunker busters and destroy it … Israel can do it on its own'. He argues that destroying generators, ventilation systems and so on at Fordow's other support plant could wreck the centrifuges inside in the same way that Natanz's were. It's noteworthy also that this week Israel bombed the factory where new enrichment machines are made. If all else fails, it's likely that the Israelis also have a plan to attack Fordow using ground forces. Their main airborne formation, the 98th Paratroopers Division, was withdrawn from Gaza earlier this month to be ready for action elsewhere. Israeli C-130 transport planes have also been seen over Syria, apparently on missions to or from Iran. There could be many reasons for those flights, for example to set up refuelling points for Israeli aircraft or ferry their forward air controllers to or from operations. But the suppression of Iran's air defences has been so extensive that it may soon be viable to mount the type of airlift needed to insert a force of several thousand troops to a forward mounting base near Fordow. It could be that a desire to retain the option of such a mission lies behind the fact that the tunnel entrances of the complex have not yet been attacked. They might need to be used by an assault force after all. This type of operation, though, would be fraught with difficulty — indeed in the view of Gallant and Ferguson it's 'not realistic'. There are thousands of Iranian troops deployed around the plant, so casualties could be high. Although the quantity of explosive needed to destroy it from the inside out might be a lot less than bombing it, it would remain considerable. While the Israelis are likely to have developed numerous plans, Iran may still hold some wild cards. 'All enriched materials have been transferred and are in secure locations,' Major General Mohsen Rezaie of the Revolutionary Guard Corps said earlier this week. He added: 'We will come out of this war with our hands full.' Many believe Iran has indeed dispersed its stockpile of highly enriched uranium from Isfahan to other sites too. A third uranium enrichment site at a secret location is believed to have been under preparation when the conflict started. What all the 'kinetic' options require — from GBU-57 bombs to ground forces — is an continuing onsite inspection regime to ensure that in the months or years to come Iran's nuclear project is not reconstituted. That might be necessary even in the 'regime change' scenario: note that international organisations are currently trying to secure the remnants of Syria's chemical arsenal. At talks with the UK, France, and Germany in Geneva on Friday, Iran showed both its willingness to engage on these issues but also its refusal to give up uranium enrichment. That's a longstanding position which is, so far, unchanged by the war. This refusal to bend may be sufficient for President Trump, mindful of the political divisions within his Maga movement, to say that a deal is impossible, despite his recent attempts to pressure Iran into one. His line last week — saying 'I may or may not' attack — may also simply have been stalling for time while final military deployments went ahead. Evidently Pentagon planners have wanted to head off various contingencies if, for example, Iran were to retaliate against their bases or diplomatic facilities in the region. But with the arrival of two stealth bombers, alongside two aircraft carriers and soon a number of F-22 stealth fighters and tanker planes, Trump will be able to deliver a final ultimatum to Iran. When that happens, the question of whether Israel can take out Fordow and other key facilities on its own may become academic.

Times

an hour ago

• Times

Trump's taking Maga fire over ‘forever wars', but the real battle awaits

'I'm the one that decides,' declared President Trump last week when asked by a reporter who gets to say what 'America First' really means. Faced with a backlash from parts of his base over the prospect of the US supporting Israel in military action in Iran, the president said his word is final — 'after all, I'm the one that developed America First' — adding that 'the term wasn't used until I came along'. In fact, the phrase dates back to the First World War when Woodrow Wilson used the slogan to appeal to voters who wanted America to stay out of the conflict. (They didn't get their wish.) The America First Committee was founded in 1940 to protest against US involvement in the Second World War, but gained notoriety after high-profile members such as the aviator Charles Lindbergh and the automotive tycoon Henry Ford led to a perception that it had antisemitic and pro-fascist sympathies. However, since Trump launched his first bid for president ten years ago, it has taken on a new meaning. 'He has driven the term back into usage,' says Julian Zelizer, the Princeton University historian and author of The Presidency of Donald J Trump: A First Historical Assessment. 'He has the most power to shape what it actually includes.' Now it represents a whole movement, extending from foreign policy to trade to immigration. No more forever wars. No more favours for other countries out of the goodness of Uncle Sam's heart. But in a week where parts of Trump's base came out and criticised the president directly, the question is being asked in Washington: is Trump still in control of the agenda — or is it the base that decides? There are certainly plenty of figures in Washington who have distinct views on what America First ought to mean in practice. Last week, the row over Iran has seen a US version of blue on blue: Maga on Maga. As the alt-right influencer Jack Posobiec put it: 'I'm just thankful the neocons are here to tell us who is REAL MAGA.' Trump has distanced himself from certain members of his cabinet, saying that his head of intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is 'wrong' on her intelligence assessment of Iran. But in his second term, Trump has had ultimate authority over his cabinet. Learning from the first term, he picked them for loyalty and deference. As a figure with close ties to the administration says: 'It's a football team. He's the manager, they're the players, they listen to the manager and that's all there is to it.' It is why the voices he needs to worry more about may be the ones on the outside. Enter the Maga-verse — the network of former advisers, informal advisers and influencers free to speak, exerting varying degrees of influence on the president. One figure close to the White House says: 'There are a bunch of people that we look to to see how things are landing.' Indeed, the administration last week reached out to key figures as they tried to control the narrative. There are different spheres of influence. Steve Bannon, Trump's former adviser, is widely regarded as the godfather of Maga. While he no longer has a place in the White House, he is seen as a temperature check on the movement by keeping the government in touch with the grassroots through his media and bringing up the next generation of Maga — several of whom have gone on to take jobs in the administration. 'Everybody just folds to whatever big corporate interest there is and this administration is only slightly different to that,' explains an insider. 'Steve keeps a check on it.' Bannon's War Room podcast regularly ranks among the top ten in the US, and has more than 200,000 followers on X. The former executive chairman of the alt-right news website Breitbart had lunch with the president last week — just before Trump's spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt announced a two-week window to make a decision on his next steps in Iran. Next, Tucker Carlson — the former Fox News host — who last week accused Trump of taking America on the wrong path. This led to Trump saying: 'I don't know what Tucker Carlson is saying. Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen.' 'He's definitely relevant,' says one Maga figure. 'But it's a much younger, less-likely-to-vote demographic that he now appeals to. It's a much lower propensity voter. I don't think he would take that as an insult. He lives in a cabin in the woods in Maine.' After the barrage of words, Trump later said he shared a phone call with Carlson who apologised for going too far. Then there's Laura Loomer — the right-wing conspiracy theorist — who regularly leads the news in DC with her social media and investigations. A Republican insider says: 'She's probably the best opposition researcher in Republican politics nationwide and she's devastatingly destructive to people. Some people might walk around with their chest puffed out and go, 'Oh, I'm not scared of Laura Loomer.' They're all scared of Laura Loomer.' Last week, Loomer and Carlson have clashed on Iran, while Bannon warned against the US getting too embroiled in any conflict. The changing media landscape is giving these figures greater prominence. Matt Boyle, the Washington bureau chief at Breitbart, says: 'We live in impassioned times, especially in the podcast era and new media.' It's not gone unnoticed in Maga world that last week streaming overtook cable and broadcast as the most-watched form of TV in the US. Yet the base is insistent there is no civil war. 'We're not a monolith, we're not the left, they don't tolerate dissent, right?' says one Maga figure. 'One part of the coalition is holding the other part of the coalition accountable.' Boyle, who was recently spotted dining with both Bannon and the Democrat senator John Fetterman, says: 'I do think that when the president makes his decision that the movement is gonna fall in line very quickly. He is the leader of the America First movement. He built this movement.' Yet Trump has never been a perfect fit for some of the views within it. In 2016, he said of America First that he wanted to make decision-making more 'unpredictable'. 'We won't be isolationists — I don't want to go there because I don't believe in that,' Trump said. 'But we're not going to be ripped off any more by all of these countries.' The historian Victor Davis Hanson, of the Hoover Institution think tank at Stanford University, says: 'Trump is neither an isolationist nor an interventionist, but rather transactional. The media fails to grasp that, so it is confused why tough-guy Trump is hesitant to jump into Iran, or contrarily why a noninterventionist Trump would even consider using bunker busters against Iran. 'The common thread again is his perception of what benefits the US middle class — economically, militarily, politically and culturally.' But internal debates go beyond foreign affairs. The other main Maga priorities are bringing jobs back to the US — through tariffs — and cracking down on immigration. Tensions have bubbled on all of these: last week Trump exempted the farm and hospitality industries from the immigration raids, only for Maga activists to raise alarm. The president then changed it back. Raheem Kassam, who is a close ally of Bannon, a co-owner of the Butterworths restaurant in Washington — a Maga hotspot — and a former adviser to Nigel Farage, says: 'It's definitely become more complex and thoughtful and flexible. 'There's now a depth where you can't necessarily fit all of Maga policy on a banner held up at a rally. You used to be able to say it was 'build the wall', 'drain the swamp'. It's developed more, it's deeper, it's denser and that's kind of what the establishment is really upset about this time. It's like, 'Oh, these guys have actually developed an element of political sophistication.'' For now, most agree — at least publicly — that Trump is king. Yet privately what is making the base so jumpy is this idea that Trump is being forced by the deep state into the default establishment policy position. If it happens to Trump, what chance does his successor have? Hanson says: 'Trump decides — in the sense of le Maga état, c'est moi. Almost everyone who tried to redefine Maga or take on Trump has mostly lost rather than gained influence. 'The key question is whether Maga continues after 2029, given Trump's unique willingness to take on the left rhetorically and concretely in a way that far exceeds the Reagan revolution, and in truth, any prior Republican. Trump's bellicosity, volatility, and resilience — his willingness to win ugly rather than lose nobly — ensure him credibility and goodwill among the base that in turn allows him greater latitude and patience.' Or as a recent visitor to the White House puts it: 'A lot of them want a Maga ideology whereas Trump is happy with it just being about him.' Kassam adds: 'Trump does largely get to decide what America First means. But the point is, there's a whole movement behind it that will want to keep the America First agenda even after Trump.' The real fight to define America First is likely to come when Trump exits the stage.