South Korea's Yoon: Embittered survivor staggers on after impeachment vote
![South Korea's Yoon: Embittered survivor staggers on after impeachment vote South Korea's Yoon: Embittered survivor staggers on after impeachment vote](https://citizentv.obs.af-south-1.myhuaweicloud.com/140486/conversions/Yoon-og_image.webp)
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol delivers an address to the nation at the Presidential Office in Seoul, South Korea, December 7, 2024. The Presidential Office/Handout via REUTERS
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol faces
the greatest challenge of his brief but chequered political career, despite surviving
a bruising impeachment challenge, as members of his own party called for him to
resign for imposing martial law.
Yoon was regarded as a tough political
survivor but became increasingly isolated, dogged by personal scandals and strife, an unyielding
opposition and rifts within his own party.
After he narrowly won election in 2022, his
recent battles have left him increasingly bitter and have drawn out a
recklessness that a former rival said was his defining trait.
By the time Yoon attempted to impose martial law on Tuesday, he was badly bruised
politically.
An impeachment motion against him failed late
on Saturday when members of his ruling party boycotted the National Assembly
session, but even some of them said he was unqualified for office and should
resign.
The opposition vowed to try again, while
Yoon's party said it would find a "more orderly, responsible" way to
resolve the crisis.
Some analysts said Yoon, a former prosecutor
who had never held elected office before his presidential election, showed
signs of being in "extreme rage" when martial law was in effect,
citing the language he allegedly used to order the arrests of some members of
parliament who had clashed with him.
A top spy agency official told a parliament
intelligence committee that Yoon said, "Grab them all and round them
up," according to panel member Kim Byung-kee.
Ihn Yohan, a physician and member of
parliament for Yoon's People Power Party considered an ally of the president,
said the martial law decree was "extreme" but not entirely
unjustified given the endless political attacks against Yoon. "I hope we
remember how the opposition party has incredibly and viciously pushed the
president and his family into the corner with threats of special prosecutors
and impeachment," he said at a party meeting on Thursday.
The past year of Yoon's presidency has been
heavily overshadowed by a scandal involving his wife, who was accused of
inappropriately accepting a pricey Christian Dior handbag as a gift and his stubborn
refusal to fully own up to it.
Only after the scandal was blamed as a major
reason for a crushing parliamentary election defeat his party suffered in April
did he apologise. But he continued to reject calls for a probe into the scandal
and into an allegation of stock price manipulation involving his wife and her
mother.
The prosecutors office that investigated the
allegations decided not to press charges against the first lady.
Yoon's struggles at home have overshadowed
the relative success he has had on the international stage.
His bold push to reverse a decades-long
diplomatic row with neighbouring Japan and join Tokyo in a three-way security
cooperation with the United States are widely seen as his signature foreign
policy legacies.
Yoon's ability to bond on a personal level,
seen as the trait that gave him his early success, was on full display at a
White House event last year, when Yoon took the stage and belted out the pop
song "American Pie" for an astounded President Joe Biden and a
delighted crowd.
Born to an affluent family in Seoul, Yoon was
an easygoing youth who excelled at school. He entered the elite Seoul National
University to study law, but his penchant for partying led him to repeatedly
fail the bar exam before passing on the ninth try.
Yoon, who turns 64 on Dec. 18, shot to
national fame in 2016 when, as the chief investigator probing then-President
Park Geun-hye for corruption, he told a reporter that prosecutors are not
gangsters, when asked if he was out for revenge.
Three years earlier, Park had suspended Yoon,
then fired him from a team investigating a high-profile case against the spy
agency. That move was widely considered punishment for challenging her
authority.
The role he played in jailing the sitting
president and his dramatic comeback as head of the powerful Seoul Central
District Prosecutors' Office, marked the start of a dizzying rise to power.
Two years later, he became prosecutor general
and spearheaded a corruption probe against a close ally of the next president,
Moon Jae-in. That made him a darling of conservatives frustrated with Moon's
liberal policies, setting him up to be a candidate for the presidency in 2022.
Yoon beat Lee Jae-myung, the current
opposition leader who led the impeachment move against him, by a margin of less
than 1%.
But Yoon's presidency got off to a rocky
start when he pushed ahead with moving the presidential office out of the Blue
House compound to a new site, facing questions whether it was because of a feng
shui belief that the old presidential compound was cursed. Yoon at the time denied any
involvement by himself or his wife with a shaman.
When Yoon refused to fire top officials after
a 2022 Halloween night disaster, in which 159
people were killed in a crowd crush in Seoul's night-life district of Itaewon,
he was accused of protecting "yes men". One of them was Safety
Minister Lee Sang-min, a close confidant and fellow graduate of Yoon's high
school.
Another alumnus of the Choongam High School
in Seoul was Kim Yong-hyun, the man who spearheaded the
presidential office move, then became the presidential security service, and in
September was appointed defence minister.
Kim was one of the two people who recommended
that Yoon declare martial law, a senior military official
said. Lee was the other, according to local media reports.
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