SoKor parliament impeaches Yoon
SEOUL—South Korea’s opposition-led parliament impeached President Yoon Suk-yeol on Saturday, voting to suspend him from his official duties over his short-lived attempt last week to impose martial law.
Under the constitution Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, who was appointed by Yoon, becomes acting president.
Yoon is the second conservative president in a row to be impeached in South Korea. Park Geun-hye was removed from office in 2017.
The motion was carried after some members of Yoon’s People Power Party joined the opposition parties, which control 192 seats in the 300-member national assembly, clearing the two-thirds threshold needed for impeachment.
The number of lawmakers supporting impeachment was 204, with 85 against, three abstentions and eight invalid ballots.
Although suspended, Yoon remains in office. The Constitutional Court will decide whether to remove him sometime in the next six months.
If Yoon is removed from office, a snap election will be called.
Resistance
Yoon shocked the nation late on Dec. 3 when he gave the military sweeping emergency powers in order to root out what he called “antistate forces” and overcome obstructionist political opponents.
He later apologized to the nation but also defended his decision and resisted calls to resign ahead of the vote.
Yoon rose from public prosecutor to the nation’s highest office in just a few years, but as president he staggered from scandal to scandal before plunging the country into crisis by declaring martial law.
The lurch back to South Korea’s dark days of military rule only lasted a few hours, and after a night of protests and high drama last week Yoon was forced into a U-turn.
But polls show a huge majority of citizens want him out and lawmakers vote Saturday on a second impeachment motion brought by the opposition, who control parliament but need eight parliamentarians from Yoon’s party to switch sides to pass the measure.
This week Yoon vowed to fight “until the very last minute” in a defiant public address in which he doubled down on claims the opposition was in league with South Korea’s communist enemies.
Star prosecutor
Born in Seoul in 1960 months before a military coup, Yoon studied law and went on to become a star public prosecutor and anticorruption crusader.
He played an instrumental role in Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s first female president, being impeached in 2016 and later convicted for abuse of power and imprisoned.
As the country’s top prosecutor in 2019, he also indicted a senior aide of Park’s successor, Moon Jae-in, in a fraud and bribery case.
The conservative People Power Party (PPP), in opposition at the time, liked what they saw and convinced Yoon to become their presidential candidate.
He duly won in March 2022, beating Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party, but by the narrowest margin in South Korean history.
Yoon was never much loved by the public, especially by women—he vowed on the campaign trail to abolish the ministry of gender equality—and scandals have come thick and fast.
This included his administration’s handling of a 2022 crowd crush during Halloween festivities that killed more than 150 people.
‘Abuse’ of power
Voters have also blamed Yoon’s administration for food inflation, a lagging economy and increasing constraints on freedom of speech.
He was accused of abusing presidential vetoes, notably to strike down a bill paving the way for a special investigation into alleged stock manipulation by his wife Kim Keon Hee.
Yoon suffered further reputational damage last year when his wife was secretly filmed accepting a designer handbag worth $2,000 as a gift. Yoon insisted it would have been rude to refuse.
Yoon has been a lame duck president since the opposition Democratic Party won a majority in parliamentary elections this year. They recently slashed Yoon’s budget.
