Kyeonghee Eo, an assistant professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University, checked X on the morning of December 3rd, 2024. It was a week before her long-awaited trip to visit family in South Korea. What she saw when she logged on made her feel a “time jump into the past.” In a televised address at 10:27 p.m. Korea Standard Time, President Yoon Suk Yeol had declared emergency martial law throughout Korea.
Yoon, the prosecutor-turned-president, is a key figure in the conservative People’s Power Party. In his December 3rd declaration, he accused leftist opposition parties, which hold 192 out of 300 seats at the National Assembly, of conducting “anti-state activities” and collaborating with North Korean Communists to sabotage the nation. Yoon’s martial law order prohibited all political activities and censored national media publications. In an attempt to arrest party leaders and prevent lawmakers from entering the Assembly, soldiers were deployed across Yeouido, the island that houses the legislative body.
It was an extreme demonstration of the polarization that has characterized Korean politics since 2017, when President Moon Jae-in won a snap election following the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. Yoon partly owes his presidency to this rise in polarization. In Korean politics, the ability to confront the opposition has perhaps become more important than political qualifications in choosing presidential candidates.
“Yoon, despite having no prior political experience, emerged as the conservative candidate after resigning as prosecutor-general following a confrontation with Moon,” a February memo by the Council on Foreign Relations reads. “His adversarial stance against Moon was viewed by the People Power Party as a strategic asset, positioning him as a champion for conservative supporters seeking retribution against the incumbent administration.”
For many Koreans, including Eo, Yoon’s declaration of martial law evoked traumatic memories. Korea has a tumultuous relationship with martial law, which had been declared 16 times in the country before 2024. The most recent declaration had lasted from 1979 to 1981.
Some of these declarations were responses to legitimate crises––rebellions, presidential assassinations, and the Korean War. However, according to Dongwon Lee, an assistant professor of history at Seoul National University, at least two instances of previous martial law declarations were self-coups. A self-coup is an illegitimate use of force by someone already in power to keep and strengthen their position.
The first self-coup, declared by President Park Chung-hee in 1972, dissolved the Assembly and amended the Constitution to eliminate Park’s term limit. The second was in 1980, when then-general Chun Doo-hwan extended an ongoing martial law in certain provinces to the whole nation in order to empower his military regime and suppress dissent. In October 1979, President Choi Kyu-hah declared martial law after Park’s assassination, but Chun seized power in December and used an expansion of martial law in May to keep power.
While Yoon’s declaration of martial law was also an attempt to preserve power, it was distinct from previous coups in two ways.
First, Korea was not embroiled in a significant social or economic crisis––a typical justification for previous declarations of martial law. According to Junhan Lee, a political science professor at Incheon National University in Incheon, Korea, past military coup leaders emerged into Korean civil politics to manage “social chaos” through force. In contrast, there was no active internal military support for the December 2024 martial law declaration.
Junhan Lee argued that only Yoon perceived a sense of crisis as polarization deepened and the opposition wielded its legislative power against him. Since Yoon’s five-year term began in 2022, the opposition-led Assembly impeached 10 ministers and consistently tried to appoint a special prosecutor to zero in on his wife’s scandals, which Yoon vetoed every time.
“The country had no problem––only Yongsan was the problem,” said Junhan Lee, referring to the Seoul district in which the presidential office is located. “The people thought the president was the crisis.”
The nature of the Korean military has also changed since the end of the last martial law, making the enforcement of martial law more difficult in 2024 than in 1981. The martial law rollout in December, then, was complicated by several obstacles. One factor was technology: Dongwon Lee said the presence of smartphones in the military, allowing contact with the outside world, made it impossible to keep secrets and “control” the soldiers.
“For the military to stage a coup, the most important thing is to keep it a secret,” Junhan Lee said. “But the fact that soldiers have phones makes it hard to keep secrets. If anyone posts a picture or tells their mom they’re being deployed for martial law, a successful coup is impossible.”
The fate of the last military regime also left an imprint on the military’s psyche. The drastic action taken against the regime’s leaders created a sense of fear among would-be dissidents. Chun and his successor Roh Tae-woo, who led the coup following Park’s death, were put on trial and sentenced to prison in 1997, a warning against anyone in the military who would plan a coup. Subsequent presidents also made sure to destroy secret military societies, the most notorious of which was Hanahoe, a private group headed by Chun.
According to Je Yeon Oh, a history professor at Sung Kyun Kwan University in Seoul, Korea, martial law has also become more challenging to execute, given Korea’s 21st-century reputation for democracy and globalization. It would have been antithetical to Korea’s image for soldiers to use force against citizens––especially on live TV.
According to Dongwon Lee, these factors have made a successful self-coup in contemporary South Korea effectively impossible, and accordingly, Yoon’s attempt unraveled in less than six hours.
After Yoon’s dramatic deployment of troops across Yeouido, lawmakers jumped over fences and slipped through soldiers to cast their votes to overturn martial law, a process that is binding with a majority vote. Meanwhile, citizens flooded the streets in protest. At 1:02 a.m. KST, the overturning motion passed in a 190-0 vote, and at 4:30 a.m., Yoon and his cabinet formally lifted the decree. Yoon, impeached by the Assembly on December 14th, still awaits the Constitutional Court’s decision on whether to remove him from office.
Eo remembers feeling struck by the reaction of the people, who embodied a rare moment of national unity following the widespread rise of polarization in recent years.
“In the midst of all of it, there was a moment of unity across political factions and different belongings, where people were really trying to find a way to fight it together,” she said. “I do think having that history––the traumatic memory––does make people hardened to know what could follow and to do everything to prevent it.”
Dongwon Lee said the question now is how Yoon could have held such an “anachronistic” belief that his self-coup could succeed. A possible explanation lies in Yoon’s background as a prosecutor.
In Korea, prosecutors hold immense power. According to Dongwon Lee, since prosecutors have the power to both investigate and prosecute individuals, their ability to investigate someone without prosecuting them has historically enabled abuses of power. Furthermore, as the prosecutor-general from 2019 to 2021, Yoon had authority over all prosecutors in Korea, and he may have assumed an ascension to the presidency would grant him a comparable or greater level of control.
Yoon even won the 2022 presidential election by framing the race between him and his competitor, the opposition leader Lee Jae-Myung, who has been accused of breaking election laws, as a battle between a prosecutor and a criminal.
“I think he thought once he becomes president, all authorities in Korea, including the Assembly, would follow his orders,” Dongwon Lee said. “But the choice of the Korean people was to keep him in check with a big opposition majority. A president well-versed in politics would have bowed to the opposition and struck deals. That’s the point of the separation of powers. But he’s not someone like that.”
Instead, Junhan Lee said, the prosecutor in Yoon saw the deadlock between him and the Assembly as a battle between good and evil. For Yoon, the polarization between his party and the left was a fight between right and wrong––between lawful and unlawful. He was used to wielding his prosecutorial power to punish his enemies, and with the strong, albeit narrow, right to martial law endowed to him as president, he made an “ignorant” attempt at a self-coup.
According to Hans Schattle, a political science professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea, this prosecutorial character is also driving Yoon to contest his impeachment.
“Yoon spent his career fighting court battles as a prosecutor, and now he’s making it clear he’s ready and eager to fight in his own defense,” Schattle said. “Given Yoon’s background and his temperament as president over the past three years, it isn’t surprising.”
Unlike past presidents who faced impeachment trials at the Constitutional Court, Yoon has personally appeared in court to justify his martial law decree, maintaining that the declaration of martial law, as a unique power given to the president, is not subject to judicial review.
His party, the People’s Power Party, is backing this defense in an effort to salvage future elections, with many supporters also endorsing false claims of election fraud about the opposition Democratic Party’s congressional victory last April. Although Yoon’s approval rating fell to 11% following his declaration of martial law and its subsequent reversal, it has rebounded to above 40%. Supporters of the People’s Power Party, most of whom initially rejected Yoon’s declaration of martial law, are increasingly endorsing the decree as a means to combat the left.
Kihoon Lee, a professor of modern Korean history at Yonsei University, said that this recovery, at least among the elderly population, may stem from anxiety resulting from the nation’s failure to meet values like social equality and elderly care post-democratization. Feeling left behind in the wake of a democratized and wealthy nation, they turned to the right.
“Certain generations feel nostalgic for a Korean society that they perceive as having been stable under dictatorships,” said Hwansoo Kim, a professor of Korean Buddhism and culture in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University. Kim added that the support for Yoon’s authoritarianism may have its roots in a backlash against “globalized capitalism.”
“In the current economic stalemate, chaotic social tensions and debates surrounding immigration, gender, and many other issues might give an impression of how chaotic society is,” he said. ”I think the older generation may look back at a time when it was less chaotic… It’s not a sudden instant orchestrated by this single individual. I think Korean society has reached a point where there is some anti-globalization sentiment going on.”
Kim also predicted that younger generations will turn towards reactionary authoritarianism, too, as they question why they have to compete for opportunities so vigorously with foreigners and even with North Korean defectors. According to Kim, this trend has already taken effect across Europe, where far-right parties appealing to anti-immigration and economic concerns have gained popularity among young voters in countries like Germany, France, and Italy.
Dongwon Lee agreed that the trend toward authoritarianism isn’t limited to Korea. Amid a global economic crisis, “hate-based” politics centered on national interests have become dominant across the world. This trend was evident when Yoon, in an attempt to justify his decree, claimed in a televised address that Chinese spies and solar panels were destroying Korea. It was an attempt to link the Democratic Party with Communism, a longstanding strategy of fear employed by the Korean right.
“For those on the right, the fear of Communism remains deeply engrained in their psyche,” Kim said.
According to Eo, a backlash against progressivism may also be driving support for Yoon.
“There were people on the streets who were feminists, who were queer, who were advocating for labor rights,” she said. “And all of them had more of a platform to speak about their agenda… I think it’s definitely a reaction against that, where they decide, ‘If I have to pick between Yoon and a queer feminist, then maybe I’ll just side with Yoon––just to shut these people up.”
Although this backlash is a strong force, it would be inaccurate to say that there is no sustained grassroots resistance against Yoon’s authoritarian shift. While progressive, minority-driven groups are off-putting to some people, they are energizing to others.
In spite of Yoon’s martial law declaration and the ensuing political turmoil, Eo returned to Korea as planned in December 2024. She was protesting on the streets of Yeouido on December 14th when the Assembly ultimately passed the vote to impeach Yoon. She remembers celebrating with hundreds of thousands of people––some of them middle-aged labor union members who rented a bus from Busan, some flying rainbow flags. It was a stark contrast to the defeatism that was prevalent among progressive circles at the beginning of Yoon’s term.
“It just took this kind of really drastic step, and everybody was suddenly out there on the streets, and it was just such a nice feeling to confirm that everyone was still alive, like they were somewhere out there just hiding and waiting for their moment,” Eo said. “When things get discouraging here, I try to remind myself of how I felt on the 14th of December. Maybe we’re not out on the streets all the time, but we’re still out there somewhere and just waiting for the storm to pass.”