My South Korean mother and father and I’ve an excellent relationship. They’ve embraced my same-sex marriage — an unusually progressive angle in our nation — and be part of my husband and me on journeys. We are able to brazenly talk about absolutely anything.
Besides Korean politics.
They’re satisfied that Yoon Suk Yeol, South Korea’s conservative former president, did the proper factor in December when, whereas in workplace, he tried to impose martial regulation and arrest opposition politicians. His transfer threw the nation into disaster, one other chapter within the intense and infrequently pointless political antagonism that has engulfed the nation in recent times.
After I referred to as my mother and father the day after Mr. Yoon’s failed try, that irreconcilable nationwide divide was evident even in my in any other case harmonious household: I condemned the blatantly undemocratic energy seize, which revived grim recollections of previous navy rule; my father praised it as essential to rein within the opposition, which he views as pro-North Korea.
Mr. Yoon’s half-baked plot fizzled inside hours. He was swiftly impeached and suspended from workplace. A ruling on Friday by the nation’s Constitutional Courtroom made his removing everlasting.
The failure of Mr. Yoon’s weird scheme has been hailed in South Korea and overseas as a triumph for democracy. There may be nothing to rejoice right here. South Korea is as divided as ever, and the entire affair ought to stand as a stark warning for democracies in every single place about what occurs when political polarization spirals uncontrolled.
South Korean politics has lengthy been stricken by a deep rift that stems largely from the decades-long division of the Korean Peninsula between North and South. This cut up South Koreans into two opposing political camps — an anti-Communist one led by an authoritarian elite that favors a tough line in opposition to North Korea, and a leftist, pro-democracy camp that advocates working towards reconciliation with Pyongyang.
After many years of navy dictatorship, South Korea lastly achieved full democracy in 1987, and the nation prospered. However that fundamental underlying fault line has widened to the purpose that the 2 events that now dominate politics — Mr. Yoon’s right-wing Folks Energy Get together and the center-left opposition Democratic Get together of Korea — view one another as enemies locked in a combat to the loss of life. It’s a battle fought with character assassination, indictments and now a chilling new precedent set by Mr. Yoon’s resort to martial regulation. The duty of governing the nation has taken a again seat.
Mr. Yoon is simply the most recent in an extended line of presidents introduced down on this “Sport of Thrones” surroundings. In the course of the nation’s formative many years, electoral manipulation and coups (and one assassination) had been the usual means by which presidents rose and fell. After democracy took maintain, the techniques softened, however it stays primarily the identical previous sport, an endless cycle of political vendetta extra attribute of a banana republic than a developed democracy.
Mr. Yoon is the third president since 2004 to be impeached (the primary of these was overturned), and the 4 presidents earlier than him have confronted felony investigations, sometimes spearheaded by the opposing celebration. Two of them went to jail, and one other, Roh Moo-hyun, jumped to his loss of life in 2009, just a little greater than a yr after leaving workplace, as prosecutors closed in.
The absurd factor is that many outsiders would most likely have problem telling the 2 sides aside. Each main events invoke nationalism in calling for a robust South Korean protection, each have ties with the highly effective family-controlled enterprise empires referred to as chaebol, each fear in regards to the nation’s plunging birthrate, and neither is progressive sufficient to champion the rights of sexual minorities like me.
The belief is dawning right here that we might not even be residing in an actual democracy. Within the wake of the martial regulation fiasco, Choi Jang-jip, a famend scholar of Korean democracy, described South Korea as a “democracy with out politics,” whose events are in a state of “quasi-civil conflict,” and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s world democracy index lowered South Korea in February from a “full democracy” to a “flawed” one. Mr. Yoon’s nonsensical excuse for what he did illustrates how democracy has misplaced its which means right here: He says he sought to interrupt the “legislative dictatorship” of the Democratic Get together, which thwarted his agenda at each flip — briefly, destroying democracy with a purpose to reserve it.
Predictably, surveys present South Koreans have low ranges of religion within the political system and the information media’s impartiality, which drives individuals to on-line sources like YouTube, the place they gorge on faux information of their echo chambers.
Fairly than jolt the nation off this dead-end path, the Yoon saga has solely additional divided Koreans. For weeks whereas the Constitutional Courtroom deliberated, the us-versus-them hostility performed out on the streets in nearly each day protests wherein all sides demonized the opposite. Along with the generational divide seen in my household, South Koreans are cut up alongside gender traces: Demonstrations in opposition to Mr. Yoon have been notable for the numerous younger ladies of their ranks, whereas younger males appear inordinately drawn to pro-Yoon rallies. As a headline in a number one newspaper put it in March, “Households, Lovers and Associates Are Divided” over the affair.
New elections have to be held inside 60 days of the Constitutional Courtroom ruling. However altering who’s in cost is unlikely to get the failing political institution to put aside its inane squabbling and deal with pressing nationwide issues like a housing affordability disaster or the best way to navigate a harmful world that President Trump is simply making worse.
Polls point out {that a} stable majority of South Koreans desire a change of presidency. That is prone to favor the Democratic Get together, whose chief, Lee Jae-myung, has been the driving drive in irritating Mr. Yoon in Parliament. In consequence, Mr. Lee is reviled by the conservative camp. He was almost killed final yr by a knife-wielding man — who was radicalized by the nation’s politics — and has been indicted on bribery and different felony prices by Mr. Yoon’s justice division.
The rot in South Korean politics is simply too deep to be cured by a single court docket ruling or election. If the nation’s politicians and citizens can’t be taught to replicate, speak and compromise, the “Sport of Thrones” will rumble on, and democracy will wither away.
Se-Woong Koo is a South Korean-born author and journalist. He based Korea Exposé, a web-based journal that targeted on Korean information, and taught Korean research at Yale College from 2013 to 2014.
The Instances is dedicated to publishing a variety of letters to the editor. We’d like to listen to what you consider this or any of our articles. Listed here are some suggestions. And right here’s our electronic mail: letters@nytimes.com.
Observe The New York Instances Opinion part on Fb, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
