On January 26, former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol was indicted for staging a coup d’état on December 3 2024. The trial will be held within 6 months. Yoon has been suspended as president since December 14, but not yet formally impeached, following an impeachment vote in the National Assembly that saw 204 votes in favor and 85 against the suspension.
An earlier attempt at impeachment failed on December 7, as the majority of National Assembly members from Yoon’s own People’s Power Party (PPP) boycotted the vote. The PPP’s then leader Han Dong-hoon instead called on Yoon to resign voluntarily.
The interim president thus became Prime Minister Han Duck-soo. However, he too was suspended after blocking a corruption investigation into Yoon Suk-yeol and his wife Kim Keon-hee and refusing to appoint the three judges needed for the Constitutional Court to begin the investigation to formally remove Yoon. For now, Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Choi Sang-mok holds the presidency on a temporary basis.
On December 10, the National Assembly voted to investigate Yoon for treason, to which he responded with a statement that he will “fight to the end”. Shortly thereafter, a process to expel Yoon from the PPP was initiated.
Following his suspension on December 14, Yoon barricaded himself in his presidential residence, under the protection of his personal security service, and refused to appear for questioning by the Corruption Investigation Office (CIO). At the same time, thousands of demonstrators mobilized in the surrounding area, some to protest against Yoon and others to express their support for him.
An arrest warrant was issued on December 31, but the first attempt to arrest Yoon on January 3 failed when police were blocked by over 200 guards from the president’s personal security service, backed by soldiers from the South Korean Armed Forces. Yoon’s lawyers argued that the arrest warrant was illegally issued by the Anti-Corruption Bureau instead of the prosecutor’s office, and that the presidential residence was protected by the State Secrets Act.
On January 15, a second attempt was made to seize Yoon’s residence, this time with over
1,000 police officers and with the support of the military. Yoon surrendered shortly afterwards, while urging his supporters to keep fighting.
An imitation of Trumpism
Like Donald Trump, Yoon has amassed a following of conservative and anti-feminist supporters, particularly young men, in what amounts to a cult of personality. On January 18–19, Yoon’s supporters led a riot to protest the extension of Yoon’s detention to prevent the destruction of evidence before trial. Several hundred protesters from a crowd of 40,000 took over the courthouse in western Seoul, armed with metal pipes and wooden stakes, in search of “communist judges”. In many ways, it was a miniature version of Donald Trump’s coup attempt on January 6, 2021.
In direct homage, Yoon’s supporters have also adopted Trump’s slogan on election fraud after Joe Biden won the 2020 US presidential election — “Stop the steal”. In his social media post after being arrested, Yoon added to the lie that the April 2024 National Assembly elections were rigged and urged not to dismiss suspicions as “conspiracy theories”.
The background to the election fraud allegations is that Yoon’s own party, the PPP, is in the minority with 108 seats in the National Assembly, while its opponent, the Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), won 170 seats out of a total of 300.
In connection with the indictment of Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun for his involvement in the coup, it was revealed on December 27 that Kim had attended at least ten meetings since March 2024 with President Yoon and the head of the military’s counterintelligence service (DCC) on the possibility of imposing martial law. The indictment also revealed that the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was tasked with arresting election officials for election fraud (The JoonAng).
Role of the working class
It is important to remember that Yoon’s biggest enemy is neither the police nor politicians in the National Assembly. Nor were they the ones who stopped the December 3 coup attempt. The biggest threat to Yoon’s regime, which prompted him to declare martial law, was the organized working class. The largest independent trade union confederation, the KCTU, had called for mass strikes in early December, with Yoon’s resignation as its main demand.
Since the coup, the KCTU has continued to call for his resignation, and street demonstrations have drawn tens of thousands. At the same time, strikes have been relatively limited. For example, rolling strikes of a few hours at a time have been held in the car industry. So far, no major coordinated strike has been organized. The risk is that the union struggle will lose steam if the movement does not move on to larger mass mobilizations, not just against Yoon and his crimes, but against the larger system that has created Yoonism, just like Trump and Trumpism. Capitalism is the disease and Yoon is the symptom
