South Korea’s constitutional court has unanimously voted to uphold the impeachment of president Yoon Suk Yeol.
Accordingly, Yeol, whose declaration of martial law in December involved special forces storming the National Assembly and National Election Commission, was officially removed from office Friday.
The court’s verdict, by a vote of 8 to 0, means South Korea will hold an election to choose a new president within 60 days. Separately, Yoon, 64, will also be tried on criminal insurrection charges.
Yoon, who was halfway into a single five-year term, is the second South Korean president to be impeached. Park Geun-hye, another conservative, was removed from office in 2017 after a corruption scandal.
The court’s decision marks the end of what has been a turbulent presidency.
Yoon was elected in 2022, beating his liberal opponent, Lee Jae-myung, by just 0.73 of a percentage point, or 247,077 votes, beginning his term on what many viewed as a weak public mandate.
Although Yoon was welcomed by the Biden administration for bringing South Korea into a three-way military pact with Japan, aligning it with the United States’ broader push to constrain China’s ambitions in the region, his track record of scandals, diplomatic gaffes and flashes of authoritarian governance made him deeply unpopular at home.
During his tenure, Yoon and his allies were criticized for trying to muzzle adversarial media outlets and journalists as well as a government-funded cartoon competition that awarded its top prize to a work lampooning Yoon.
As part of his martial law order, Yoon banned all political activity and placed the media under military control.
His wife, Kim Keon-hee, was trailed by myriad controversies of her own, including revelations that she plagiarized her master’s thesis.
Yoon remained defiant at his impeachment trial, claiming that he was being framed for insurrection by his political enemies — and that his declaration of martial law was intended as a plea for public attention.
Since December, he has attempted to justify his declaration of martial law with accusations that members of the liberal opposition party — which holds 192 of the legislature’s 300 seats — were North Korea sympathizers who used their “legislative tyranny” to paralyze his government. It was an echo of the anti-communist rhetoric that past military dictators and subsequent conservative leaders have frequently invoked against South Korean liberals, who have long been defined by their support for reconciliation with Pyongyang.
In defending his decision to deploy troops to the election commission, Yoon has cited a widely debunked conspiracy theory that last year’s general elections, which resulted in his conservative People Power Party suffering a crushing defeat by the liberals, were compromised by voter fraud.
“The declaration of emergency martial law on Dec. 3 was intended to announce that the country is currently facing an existential crisis, and to desperately appeal to the public so that they would become aware of this situation and give their support in overcoming it,” Yoon told the Constitutional Court in early March.
But in their testimonies to the court and prosecutors, many of the military and government officials once under Yoon’s command contradicted his version of events, recalling orders to arrest Yoon’s political opponents — and to prevent the National Assembly from exercising its constitutionally guaranteed right to lift martial law with a vote, as it did hours after the president’s declaration.
Source: Agency Reports
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