SEOUL, South Korea — The downfall of conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, impeached and stripped of his powers after his shock martial law decree early last month, is suddenly looking less certain.
Two public opinion polls found that the popularity of both Mr. Yoon and his People Power Party (PPP) have rebounded in recent days. On Wednesday, the opposition-controlled National Assembly failed to pass bills that would have authorized probes into Mr. Yoon’s abortive martial law decree and into suspected illegal activities by the president’s wife.
It marks quite a turnaround for a figure many here believed politically finished. The National Assembly voted to impeach Mr. Yoon on Dec. 14, and did the same to his successor, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, 13 days later.
But last Friday, Mr. Yoon’s presidential security detail prevented police and special investigators from detaining him on charges of insurrection, arguing the detention was illegitimate. That failure led to the humiliation of the investigative body during questions in the National Assembly, and an unseemly spat between the investigators and the police force.
Meanwhile, the National Assembly’s legal counsel has advised lawmakers to drop an insurrection charge against Mr. Yoon. Dropping that charge, which has been disputed by the minority People Power Party, would accelerate the Constitutional Court’s proceedings on impeachment, the counsel argued.
And in a country where street politics vies with executive and legislative clashes, even the streets are no longer dominated by anti-Yoon forces demanding his removal.
The president’s supporters, massed under a coalition of conservative and Christian groups, have mobilized and surrounded the presidential residence, while flooding central Seoul’s Gwanghwamun district on weekends. They have recorded the scenes with drones, so nobody can dispute the size of their gatherings.
It is a starkly different political landscape from just a few weeks ago.
In the second week of December, Mr. Yoon’s approval ratings plunged to a low of 11% in the wake of the failed coup. But a Jan. 3-4 poll by the Korea Public Image Research Institute found his support had shot up to 40%.
The institute’s poll has been criticized by left-wing newspaper The Hankyoreh for “leading questions” and “bias.” However, a separate Jan. 6 poll by the widely cited Realmeter found that support for Mr. Yoon’s PPP was 34.4% — up from 30.6% one week earlier.
Realmeter also found the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea’s support stood at 45.2% — ahead of Mr. Yoon’s PPP but well down from the DPK’s 52.4% following the martial law fiasco.
After Mr. Yoon’s short-lived decree of martial law – a policy many South Koreans echoed the authoritarian governments that ruled South Korea until 1987 and that had been consigned to the dustbin of history – the left has dominated the political debate in recent weeks.
Now, however, South Korea’s right wing is compelled to stand up and be counted, said Hwang Kyo-ahn, who led the country as acting president when the last conservative president, Park Geun-hye, was impeached and forced from office in 2017.
“We are in a big crisis right now: We are suppressed by the attacks of the left wing, by disunity among the right wing, and our president is impeached,” Mr. Hwang told foreign reporters on Wednesday. “It’s very tough and serious, … but the right wing who were complacent in past years are now rising up.”
Questioning the system
If Mr. Yoon is forced out, it is widely expected that DPK leader Lee Jae-myung would win a subsequent presidential election, handing South Korea’s left control of both the legislature and the executive branch. That possibility is compelling reluctant conservatives to stand up and give voice to previous taboos, including questioning the integrity of the electoral system.
“When I talked about election fraud, I was treated as a liar, it was treated as a conspiracy,” said Yoon Kyung-byung, a chemistry professor at Seoul’s Sogang University. “I made so many enemies.”
After the president deployed commandos to seize data from the National Election Commission on the night of martial law, the issue re-entered public discourse. Echoing now-President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters in the U.S., conservative protesters are waving banners emblazoned with the English signage, “Stop the Steal.”
Christian Protestants are stalwarts of South Korea’s conservative bloc. A major mobilizer is the Reverend Jun Kwang-hoon, chairman of the “Gwanghwamun Patriots’ Rally.”
“We made a USB and sent it to the president. We said half the opposition party lawmakers were voted through a fraudulent election,” Rev. Jun, a fire-and-brimstone preacher with a vast following, told foreign media on Monday. “The National Intelligence Service tried to to hack the [National Election Commission] seven times, and they breached it six times, therefore President Yoon was sure our election system was rigged.”
Mr. Jun was a ferocious critic of Mr. Yoon’s predecessor, liberal president Moon Jae-in, who left office in 2022, telling foreign reporters in 2019 that Mr. Moon was “worse than Adolf Hitler!” – arguing that Hitler was a German patriot while Mr. Moon, he claimed, worked for North Korea.
Mr. Moon downgraded relations with Japan, something Mr. Yoon reversed – but neither ended Seoul’s alliance with Washington, nor broke sanctions on North Korea.
Having published and distributed to Korean-Americans a book called “Trump and God,” Rev. Jun revealed he will attend the Republican president-elect’s inauguration in Washington.
Still, even staunch Yoon supporters admit the uncertainty over the election fraud charges.
“We have a few bits of circumstantial evidence for election fraud, but no substantial evidence,” admitted Kim Chul-hong, who teaches at the Presbyterian University. “We hope that President Yoon has substantial evidence as he sent troops and got some information from the election commission computer servers.”
If data is revealed in upcoming Constitutional Court hearings, “there will be an upheaval to turn round the political geography of Korea,” Mr. Kim said.
Some of the impeached president’s supporters hope the controversies of election fraud and “fake news” in South Korea may elicit some sympathy from the incoming Trump administration.
Elon Musk “is the right arm of Trump and is paying attention to our progress,” said Sogang University’s Mr. Yoon, a reference to the “wow” the billionaire entrepreneur posted on X in response to a photo of South Korean conservative protesters waving U.S. flags.
Longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon “this morning had an interview with a Korean reporter about the real situation here,” the academic continued. “He mentioned that legacy news media are not paying attention to the anti-impeachment or pro-Yoon activity. Legacy media is helping these pro-impeachment groups.”
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.