South Korea Impeaches President as Demands Grow for Democratic Reforms

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, South Korea’s parliament has impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol over his short-lived attempt to declare martial law. An earlier vote had failed after members of Yoon’s ruling party boycotted the vote, but this time at least 12 members of his party backed impeachment.

SPEAKER WOO WON–SHIK: Let me announce the results of the vote. The impeachment motion of President Yoon Suk Yeol was passed with 204 votes out of 300 total votes. Eighty-five reject, and three are invalid.

AMY GOODMAN: Yoon Suk Yeol remains in office, but his presidential powers have been suspended. His future now rests in the hands of the South Korean Constitutional Court, which will decide whether he should be removed as president The court will hold its first public hearing December 27th.

We go now to Seoul, where we’re joined by Dae-Han Song, head of the networking team of the International Strategy Center, also part of the No Cold War collective.

Can you talk about these latest developments over the weekend?

DAE–HAN SONG: Sure. This Saturday, basically, there was a vote again in the National Assembly. It hadn’t passed the previous Saturday. And in this instance, as you mentioned, 12 of the ruling party members flipped to the side of voting for the impeachment. And I think one of the key moments this week was that Yoon had made a speech in which he basically said, “I was completely justified in declaring martial law, and I’m going to fight this to the end.” Right? Before, the ruling party had been kind of selling this notion of a kind of like an orderly resignation. But, basically, the speech kind of completely dispelled the possibility of that. And, of course, that switched to flipping — it flipped a key number of his own party members to vote in favor of the impeachment motion.

And this also just brought a lot of people this Saturday. If there were like a million people the previous Saturday, there were definitely over a million people. I myself was there about a half-mile from the main stage, and even there, it was completely packed. Right? And, of course, we had people from — I think the speech just even brought even more people, people of all ages, anything from older people, middle-age people, all the way to just like young people with K-pop light sticks that had come. So, yeah, it’s very interesting.

I was out and talking to some activists and organizers, and one person had mentioned that a lot of people think that — this is kind of the understanding of how Yoon could be this way. People say, “Oh, Yoon is addicted to alcohol, he’s addicted to power, and he’s addicted to YouTube.” Right? And then, the question is: Addicted to YouTube? Well, I think the idea is that he is not watching the media. He is not — it just speaks to how out of touch he is with what people are thinking and that he’s mostly — you know, the idea is that he’s focused mostly on the right-wing, ultra-right-wing media and all that stuff, that is feeding a lot of his different talking points, right? So, I think that’s just to show that — how out of touch he is and how his speech reflected that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, what happens next? This has to — the vote has to now be reviewed by the Constitutional Court, but there’s a problem in terms of the composition of the court? Could you talk about that, as well?

DAE–HAN SONG: Sure. Right now, basically, by the Constitution, there has to be a quorum of seven justices in the Constitutional Court, and then six have to vote for it. Right now there are only six judges, six justices. And so, three of them have to be, basically, elected, or the candidates have to be put forth by the National Assembly, and they have to be approved by the president, which in this case would be the prime minister. A lot of this is procedural. A lot of this stuff has to happen, right? The Constitutional Court, they have to have the number of justices necessary, and also they have to vote to confirm the impeachment. And in some regards, people are assuming that this will happen. But, of course, people still need to be on guard, and there still needs to be a lot of eyes from around the world keeping pressure on to make sure that this process continues.

AMY GOODMAN: And your concern about the rise of authoritarianism in the world and how South Korea fits into that picture right now, when you clearly have a people’s movement that responded to the declaration of martial law and, within six hours, forced the president to take it back?

DAE–HAN SONG: Sure. I think, in many regards, Korean democracy, it’s not going to go — it’s unwilling to be pushed back to the period of the dictatorship, is [unwilling] to go back to when martial law is declared for no reason other than just to basically maintain your own power.

I think what’s interesting is that, of course, this is not the first time that it happened, right? 2016, there was also a process that impeached President Park Geun-hye for similar charges. And I think one of the — a lot of the conversation that’s happening among progressive movements and social movements right now is this idea that if Yoon gets impeached — right? — after that, what happens? Right? What is the process that follows that? And, of course, in the last candlelight protest that impeached President Park Geun-hye, a lot of the reforms, the democratic reforms, a lot of these things that were supposed to happen didn’t happen. And that’s why eight years later now we see history repeating itself. So I think a lot of the conversation right now is about, beyond defending democracy, how do you go into expanding democracy by carrying out a lot of different reforms that are necessary in Korea.

AMY GOODMAN: Dae-Han Song, we want to thank you for being with us, head of the networking team of the International Strategy Center, part of the No Cold War collective, speaking to us from Seoul, South Korea.

Coming up, we look at the anger unleashed against the health insurance industry following the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Stay with us.