In South Korea, President Yoon’s madness

“It’s a suicide mission!” » This is how a South Korean journalist described the surprise imposition of martial law announced Tuesday evening, December 3, on television by President Yoon Suk-yeol. In a few words, President Yoon, 63, will have thrown South Korea into chaos. “A decision worthy of a dictator,” added this journalist who has specialized in the political affairs of his country for years. “I never imagined experiencing such authoritarian madness in 2024,” reacted Jeong Moon, another journalist. A popularity in free fallFaced with a budget contested by parliamentarians and a popularity rating in free fall, the former attorney general Very conservative Yoon Suk-yeol, narrowly elected to the presidency in 2022, had justified this exceptional measure claiming to want to “eliminate elements hostile to the state”. By establishing “a legislative dictatorship”, he would have wanted to “protect liberal South Korea from the threats posed by North Korean communist forces”. A diatribe with Cold War overtones harkening back in the South Korean collective unconscious to the dark years of the dictatorships of Generals Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan in the 1970s and 1980s. This jurist steeped in anti-communism, who entered very late in political, has never hidden his game. Faced with North Korea, he said he was ready for a preventive strike “if necessary”. An option that experts consider largely unrealistic, but which could provoke nuclear war on the Korean peninsula. “In the event of serious military tension with the North, it is not so much Kim Jong-un that worries me,” a military expert even confided to the NK News agency, “but the possible rash and extreme reactions of Yoon. » Dark memories of past dictatorships He was also noted for his praise of the ex-dictator Chun Doo-hwan (nicknamed the “Butcher of Gwangju”, where thousands of pro-democrats were massacred in 1980 under his dictatorship) , recalling a dark period that traumatized all of South Korea for decades, before regaining democracy in the early 1990s. Anti-feminist assumed, he notably denied the existence of systematic and amply proven discrimination from which women in South Korea suffer. He “signed his own end to power” By declaring martial law, the president lit the fuse of protest , which risks intensifying until his dismissal. “We will file a complaint” against the president, his ministers of defense (the latter has offered his resignation) and of the interior and against “key figures in the army and police, such as the commander of the law martial (an army general, Editor’s note) and the police chief,” announced the Democratic Party on Wednesday, December 4. Even Yoon’s party, Power to the People, distanced itself from the president’s initiative. His chief of staff and several of his advisors “presented their collective resignation” on Wednesday, December 4. The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, the country’s largest and most powerful inter-union organization with 1.2 million members, called for an “indefinite general strike” until Yoon’s resignation, saying he had “signed his own end to the power “.



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