South Korean lawmakers push to impeach president after martial law decree
South Korean opposition parties submitted a bill to Parliament to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol, with voting set for Friday or Saturday.
South Korean lawmakers began impeachment proceedings against President Yoon Suk Yeol after he briefly imposed martial law and then reversed course on that decision just hours later.
Yoon claimed martial law was necessary to protect the country from "North Korea's communist forces" and to "eliminate anti-state elements." However, the move came as Yoon is embroiled in a dispute with opposition lawmakers over budget proposals and mired in a series of scandals linked to corruption and influence-peddling.
The martial law declaration caught South Korea's political establishment and U.S. officials by surprise. Yoon rescinded the measure only after a broad coalition of lawmakers in the National Assembly − South Korea's Parliament − voted to block it and the country appeared to be heading toward wide-scale protests.
Lawmakers on Wednesday submitted a motion to vote on removing Yoon by as early as Friday or Saturday. To make that happen, they would need two-thirds support in the 300-seat National Assembly.
The main opposition Democratic Party and its allies control at least 191 seats. That means some lawmakers from Yoon’s ruling People Power Party will need to be persuaded to break ranks for an impeachment trial to move ahead.
Yoon is a conservative politician who has long been hawkish on South Korea's nuclear-armed neighbor to the north. He has been plagued by personal allegations, including that his wife inappropriately accepted a designer handbag as a political gift.
Yoon has been deeply unpopular in South Korea ever since he narrowly won the presidency in 2022. The opposition Democratic Party won the majority of seats in parliamentary elections in April, meaning he's a so-called lame-duck president who has not been able to make headway with his own legislative agenda.
South Korea is a major U.S. military and economic partner, and the U.S. has maintained a large troop presence there since the end of the Korean War in 1953. South Korea emerged from a series of dictatorships and military-authoritarian rule to become a democracy in the late 1980s.
Analysts said that while the fallout from Yoon's actions injects political turmoil into a country long viewed as a stable democracy in Asia, it is unlikely to affect its security or economic relationship with the U.S.
"South Koreans responded as they have for decades. They gathered in defiance of Yoon's martial law, crying out for the democracy that their peers, children, parents, relatives, friends and neighbors struggled and died for," said Ji-Yeon Yuh, a professor of history at Northwestern University, in emailed comments.
"They will not go back to those dark decades."