For Yoon Suk Yeol, it appears, the tables have turned.
In 2017 the then prosecutor general led the legal action to remove then-president Park Geun-hye from office after she was convicted of abuse of power.
Now, in the most bizarre, chaotic, few hours in recent South Korean political history, Yoon himself is facing the music.
It took just hours for Yoon’s position as president to go from precarious to untenable on Tuesday. Two years after he was sworn in after a bitterly divisive election, it is hard to see how Yoon, an arch conservative, can survive Tuesday’s disastrous attempt to impose martial law.
Opposition parties are mustering their forces – which potentially include members of Yoon’s own People Power party – in anticipation of an impeachment vote in the same national assembly that voted to immediately lift martial law around six hours after it was imposed.
While Asia’s fourth-largest economy – and neighbour to a hostile nuclear-armed North Korea – reels from the political turmoil Yoon fomented – it appears that only his resignation will halt attempts to make him the second South Korean president to be forced from office since the country became a democracy less than four decades ago.
While Yoon beat his Democratic party challenger, Lee Jae-myung, in their March 2022 presidential election, the momentum is now with Lee, who led the challenge to martial law in the early hours of Wednesday.
Yoon had attempted to justify the imposition of martial law by referencing the presence in South Korea of “shameless pro-North Korean, anti-state forces” determined to destroy [South Korea’s] democracy, although he did not offer any evidence for his claim.
It is far more likely that other, less fanciful, factors were behind his decision.
Yoon, a controversial figure who is rumoured to have consulted shamanistic healers before deciding not to move into the president’s official Blue House residence, vowed to take a hardline stance against North Korea, ending attempts by his liberal predecessor, Moon Jae-in, to engage with the regime through summits with its leader, Kim Jong-un.
Yoon owed his election victory to support from young male voters who said they had been alienated by the country’s rush to embrace women’s empowerment, despite evidence of South Korea’s poor record on gender equality.
An avowed “anti-feminist”, he pledged to abolish the ministry for gender equality and family, claiming South Korean women did not suffer systemic discrimination. While the ministry remains, the post of minister has been vacant since February.
Born in Seoul in 1960, Yoon is a relative newcomer to politics, having spent 27 years as a prosecutor before running for the presidency. After studying law he went on to become an accomplished public prosecutor and crusader against corruption. In 2019, while South Korea’s prosecutor general, he burnished his credentials as a legal mastermind after indicting a senior aide of the outgoing president, Moon Jae-in, in a fraud and bribery case.
But Yoon’s approval ratings have plummeted since he took office in 2022 over a series of scandals and controversies that triggered calls for his impeachment before the events of Tuesday night.
Protests against his administration have grown in recent weeks, amid anger over his handling of the economy, rising prices and his failure to push policies through the opposition-controlled national assembly. Last week a Gallup Korea poll showed his approval rating had fallen to just 19%.
Allegations surrounding his wife, first lady Kim Keon Hee, have only added to his problems. Kim, whom Yoon married 12 years ago, initially won admirers for embracing her public role, using her status to promote Korean art, culture and fashion, and to oppose South Korea’s now-banned trade in dog meat.
But her love of designer handbags landed her – and her husband – in hot water when, early this year she was accused of accepting a 3m won (£1,675) Dior bag as a gift from a pastor. Anti-graft laws prohibit a public official’s spouse from receiving gifts worth more than 1m won in one sitting, but this must be “in connection with the duties of the public official”. Yoon and his supporters dismissed the claims as part of a political smear campaign.
Together, the opposition parties have 192 seats, just short of controlling the two-thirds of the national assembly’s 300 seats they need to impeach Yoon – a move that would then have to be upheld by at least six of the nine judges on the constitutional court.
But his dramatic move to invoke martial law, reportedly made without the prior knowledge of South Korea’s most important ally the US, managed to turn even members of his own party against him, with the People Power chair describing his actions as “unlawful”. In their pre-dawn vote, 10 of Yoon’s party members joined opposition MPs in rejecting martial law by 190 votes to zero.
While the world was wrongfooted by the turmoil, it was clear some time ago that Yoon was planning something extraordinary, according to Jamie Doucette and Jinsoo Lee, Korea experts at Manchester University.
Writing on the Jacobin website, they cited a warning over Yoon’s behaviour issued in September by the Democratic lawmaker Kim Min-seok, who noted that Yoon had promoted high school classmates and close associates to prominent positions in state administration and the military.
“To many people, this kind of premonition sounded shrill,” Doucette and Lee wrote. “But by early Wednesday, even Korea’s deeply conservative Chosun Ilbo [newspaper] declared that ‘Kim Min-seok was right.’”
Yoon was instrumental in Park Geun-hye’s political demise; now he appears to be the architect of his own downfall.
