The events that have unfolded in South Korea this month, beginning with the President Yoon Suk-yeol’s short-lived declaration of martial law on Dec. 3, have underscored both the remarkable resilience and underlying fragility of the country’s democracy.
The system survived this time, but no democracy is safe if it constantly faces severe stress tests.
First, the good news. The South Korean National Assembly quickly passed a resolution to rescind Yoon’s declaration of martial law. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest the president’s order and pressure lawmakers from the ruling People Power Party (PPP) to support his impeachment.
Their efforts worked: While PPP representatives walked out of the assembly during the first impeachment vote, they supported the motion the second time, and it passed.
Yoon has been suspended and must wait up to six months for the Constitutional Court to decide whether to uphold his impeachment. If it does, a new presidential election would be held within 60 days.
This uneasy period has been made even more uncertain by then-interim president Han Duck-soo’s refusal to nominate three justices to fill the nine-member court. Han himself has now been impeached.
This ongoing drama highlights fundamental vulnerabilities in South Korea’s political system. The 1987 constitutional amendment that ended the country’s military dictatorship introduced a single-term, five-year presidency. Citizens were so elated finally to be able to elect their president by direct popular vote that few questions were asked about the constraints on presidential power.
It has since become apparent that South Korea’s constitutional framework lacks sufficient checks and balances.
Although the constitution tasks prime ministers with recommending the appointment or dismissal of Cabinet members, successive presidents have unilaterally wielded these powers. Moreover, ruling parties have functioned more as extensions of the presidential office than as independent entities capable of exercising meaningful oversight. Even the judiciary might be susceptible to the president’s influence.
With no institution effectively restraining executive power, many political scientists and commentators have labeled South Korea’s system an “imperial presidency.”
While South Koreans choose their “emperor” through direct elections, they are heavily influenced by partisan and often-misleading information. Private YouTube channels and social-media accounts, among others, have turbocharged a longstanding problem that makes it all too easy for unqualified or authoritarian-leaning leaders to win power.
In the four decades since democratization, four South Korean presidents have been imprisoned, one has committed suicide and three, including Yoon, have faced impeachment.
There is one political actor that might be able to challenge the president: the opposition party. However, South Korea’s winner-take-all political system — in which the victors claim all the spoils, and the losers are left empty-handed — promotes extreme polarization and relentless power struggles.
It does not help that South Korea’s politics are dominated by just two parties, the PPP and the Democratic Party. This partly reflects the predominance of single-member electoral districts.
In the 2020 legislative elections, the ruling and opposition parties secured 90 percent of the seats in the National Assembly, despite winning only two-thirds of the proportional representation (party-list) votes, meaning that nearly one-third of the electorate was effectively left without representation.
In two-party systems, opposition parties often reject even sensible government initiatives, fearing that any success for the ruling party might diminish their electoral prospects.
The antagonism inherent in South Korea’s two-party system formed the basis of Yoon’s justification for declaring martial law. In a Dec. 12 address, Yoon accused the opposition of disrupting government operations by seeking “the impeachment of numerous government officials, who, even without wrongdoing, faced long suspensions from their duties.” Yoon also said that since his election, there have been “178 rallies” calling for his resignation or impeachment.
Although this hardly justifies Yoon’s decision to declare martial law, it does support the conclusion that the 1987 constitutional system has outlived its usefulness. Beyond hampering domestic governance, extreme polarization undermines foreign-policy continuity, with each transfer of power bringing a radical shift in external relations.
If Yoon’s impeachment is upheld, his signature diplomatic initiative — improving South Korea’s long-contentious relations with Japan, and establishing a robust trilateral partnership with that country and the US — could be weakened or even reversed.
That might destabilize the Indo-Pacific region at a delicate moment, with US president-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House adding to the climate of uncertainty in the region. The authoritarian axis of China, Russia and North Korea would certainly jump on any opportunity to exploit instability or antagonism.
To break the cycle of political crises, facilitate better governance and bolster policy stability, South Korea must establish a new political framework that includes stronger checks and balances and fosters genuine power-sharing.
For example, the popularly elected president’s mandate could be reformed to focus primarily on foreign policy, with domestic governance being delegated to a prime minister selected by the National Assembly.
If, in time, a more stable and effective party system emerges, South Koreans might consider moving toward many more seats for proportional representation and a parliamentary system.
No democracy is free of imperfections, but the flaws in South Korea’s system are becoming a barrier to good governance — and they are increasingly reverberating internationally, like a malign version of the country’s K-pop bands. Rather than following the same old pattern of maximizing their own short-term gains without regard for the future, South Korean politicians must take the opportunity the current crisis presents to pursue meaningful and long-awaited institutional reforms.
Yoon Young-kwan, a former minister of foreign affairs of the Republic of Korea, is chairman of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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