Yoon Had Little to Lose

The South Korean presidency always ends in disgrace

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At 10:23 pm last night, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law in an unexpected televised address. The justification centered on the growing opposition his administration has faced since his People Power Party (PPP) suffered an overwhelming defeat in this year’s midterms. With the shrew legal mind of a former prosecutor, Yoon deemed congressional attempts to impeach ministers and prosecutors, investigate him and his wife, and cut the national budget part of "pro-North Korean, anti-state forces.”

Given the clear political motive, Yoon’s measure was met with rapid resistance across the political spectrum. At 10:40 pm, opposition leader Lee Jae-myung announced an emergency assembly session to overturn the order. While the Korean constitution allows the presidents to mobilize military forces in the event of war, armed conflict or similar national emergency, it also insists that they comply with the National Assembly should it vote to lift martial law.

At 1:04 am, the 190 assembly members present voted unanimously to overturn Yoon’s decree. Later in the morning, Yoon acknowledged the reversal.

Nothing ever happens.

But Yoon may have come closer to succeeding than some realize. Armed troops arrived at the National Assembly past midnight, clashing with lawmakers and legislative aides. It certainly looks like Yoon was trying to arrest his opposition in the National Assembly before they could vote to lift the order—his theory of the case, after all, was that they were “anti-state forces.” One Korean outlet claims that CCTV footage shows a military arrest team searching for assembly members Lee Jae-myung and Woo Won-sik, as well as Justice Minister Han Dong-hoon.

Of note, Yoon’s support was once strong among the young men who make up Korea’s armed forces. In the 2022 election, Yoon won almost 6 in 10 of young male voters—his largest support margin among all groups besides senior citizens. Perhaps Yoon thought this base would deliver for him by arresting his opponents.

But even this scenario is far-fetched. For such a plot to succeed, Yoon would have needed some combination of support from his party or the public. He had neither. In fact, if the CCTV footage is to believed, he was trying to arrest his own party’s leader, Han Dong-hoon. (It also appears that Yoon has been losing support among his young male bloc for some time now.)

Suffice to say, this was an unusually large gamble for a president to take—more in line with what you’d expect from a nation that exports bananas rather than semiconductors. But the key context to keep in mind is that Yoon is a South Korean president over halfway through his first, and legally only, term. And as a South Korean president, he was not facing the luxury of fading into irrelevancy after he left office as most ex-presidents in the US do.

You see, basically all South Korean presidents have been embroiled in major scandals post-presidency, and these scandals do much more than just reputational harm. In almost every case, the former president or their family has been arrested. If you’re like the dictator Park Chung-hee, you have the good fortune of being assassinated before this happens, but then, your daughter will just becomes president 33 years later and—would you believe it—get impeached and arrested.

Let’s examine the fate of South Korea’s last eight presidents, noting that Roh Tae-woo was the first democratically elected president in South Korean history:

• Chun Doo-hwan (1980-1988): Arrested for accepting bribes after democratic transition.

• Roh Tae-woo (1988-1993): Arrested for accepting bribes.

• Kim Young-sam (1993-1998): Son arrested for accepting bribes and tax evasion.

• Kim Dae-jung (1998-2003): Both sons arrested for accepting bribes.

• Roh Moo-hyun (2003-2008): Committed suicide while under investigation for accepting bribes. Brother had already been arrested for accepting bribes before his death. Daughter arrested later.

• Lee Myung-bak (2008-2013): Arrested for accepting bribes, embezzlement, and tax evasion. Older brother arrested for accepting bribes.

• Park Geun-hye (2013-2017): Impeached and arrested for abuse of power, accepting bribes, coercion and leaking government secrets.

• Moon Jae-in (2017-2022): Under investigation for accepting bribes.

So if you aren’t president for life in Korea, there’s a very good chance you will live to see yourself or your loved ones get arrested. Probably for bribes.

One part of the problem is that there is in fact a lot of influence peddling and bribery within elite circles in South Korea. My impression is that greasing the wheels, so to speak, has very deep roots in Korean society. I think this passage from Chae Man-sik’s 1939 short story “A Man Called Hungbo” sums it up well (ignore that the translator seems to be a fan of Uncle Remus):

And then this past March, when Constable Kim was attempting to enroll Chŏngja at good ol’ Hyŏn’s primary school and everyone was having a devil of a time getting even their seven- and eight-year-olds registered because of the usual enrollment squeeze, good ol’ Hyŏn had done some fast footwork, thanks to which Chŏngja was admitted without incident.

‘This here girl’s the daughter of a cousin on my mother’s side, so you’ve got to find a place for her even if that means turning away ten other children.’

Of course he told the principal and vice-principal this, and he even went out of the way to make several appearances before the school board because he happened to know one of the clerks there. And even if the constable wasn’t actually a cousin, a good neighbour is worth his weight in cousins…

Of course, South Korea’s growth miracle happened under conditions of widespread bribery, influence-peddling, etc., so be an enlightened cultural relativist for a moment, please.

The other part, though, is that Korean prosecutors have inordinate power and use it to settle political scores. Traditionally, the Prosecutors’ Office in Korea had the exclusive right to issue indictments and the right to direct investigations. Police in South Korea are not even not allowed to apply for warrants.

In a nation like the US, of course, these tasks are divided between different entities. For a federal case, the FBI investigates and federal attorneys outside the FBI prosecute. Because of the Fifth Amendment, federal indictments are made via a grand jury for felony crimes. This diffusion of authority works to prevent political witch hunts, to a debatable degree.

The concentration of prosecutorial power in Korea has been all the more disastrous given the limited oversight of the Prosecutors’ Office. As Neil Chisholm points out, the organization is based on the Continental European tradition of bureaucratic accountability, with prosecutorial selection by meritocratic exam, control by regulations, and hierarchical supervision. (Much of South Korean civil law is German via Japan.)

In effect, this means prosecutors are selected very young and inculcated into the office’s existing culture, with a strict timeline for promotions. Loyalty, however, determines who gets the best assignments, so everyone strives to please the top prosecutor, who in turn generally wishes to please the president who appointed them. This can mean launching politically motivated probes with resolute force. And given that the politically tainted special investigations department of the Prosecutor’s Office handles just 1-2 cases a month—compared to 200-300 for a regular department—there is ample time to investigate and prosecute a case to the full extent.

One former prosecutor explains the dynamics:

It is a lighter workload in peacetime [when there is no urgent case], but you have to be successful in order to get promoted and to save face. If the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office or President want to investigate something, you have to make cases or else you get a bad reputation. You have to find corruption, or else it’s bad for you. Sometimes we don’t investigate cases, we investigate people. There’s a saying: “There is no one that you shake and dirt does not come off.”

Because of their investigative function, prosecutors are also known to build reserves of blackmail against politicians:

We do informal investigations . . . Once I found a record of interrogation. In it, a witness said he gave a kickback to the mayor of a certain city. I thought the evidence was sufficient to prosecute the mayor or begin an investigation. But [my superiors] just held it. And then the mayor switched parties, moving from the opposition to the in-power party. It was sudden and unexpected. At the time of the change, we were all very surprised. Years later I found investigation documents. I think some prosecutors who did the interrogation told the Blue House, someone in the Blue House threatened the mayor, and he changed parties.

It is notable that former President Roh Moo-hyun, who jumped from a cliff as a corruption probe closed in, claimed his failure to reform the prosecutors’ office was the cause of his downfall:

I was unable to divest investigative authority from the prosecutors and transfer it to the police. I also failed to establish the Corruption Investigation Office for High-Ranking Officials. And I deeply regret both of these failures. Trying to guarantee the political neutrality of the prosecutors without conducting such institutional reforms was naive and short-sighted. The humiliation and persecution that my allies and I have suffered since the end of my administration are the price we are paying for that naivete and short-sightedness

Former President Moon Jae-in made reforming prosecutorial power central to his campaign platform in 2017. As president, he signed two bills in 2020 that shifted some authority over criminal investigations to the police and created the Corruption Investigation Office (CIO) to monitor high-ranking officials who the Prosecutors’ Office might strategically overlook. The reforms were both self-serving and insufficient. Prosecutors still have the power to investigate corruption and financial crimes and issue indictments. But conveniently for Moon, these reforms undermined the Prosecutors’ Office’s ability to continue its investigation of Moon’s allies. (It is also hard not to interpret the CIO as a tool for the political left to go after leaders that the traditionally right-leaning Prosecutors’ Office would not.)

No one should understand these dynamics as well as President Yoon. He was, after all, the Prosecutor General under President Moon, whose trust he had earned despite political differences by proving an impartial prosecutor during the Park Geun-hye scandal. But the two quickly had a falling out when Yoon showed himself willing to investigate Moon’s allies. Moon’s justice minister was soon trying to force Yoon to resign, but Yoon withstood the pressure and unexpectedly became a presidential favorite among conservatives.

When Yoon won the presidency, the Prosecutors’ Office he once headed continued its probes into Moon’s allies, which the Democratic Party (DPK) insists are a political witch hunt. The office already unleashed a string of indictments against opposition leader Lee Jae-myung, who was recently convicted of violating election laws. As mentioned above, former President Moon is himself now under investigation.

But with the PPP’s loss in this year’s midterms, an emboldened opposition has been hitting back, targeting both Yoon and his wife for alleged corruption and trying to impeach top prosecutors. Alarmingly for Yoon, PPP leader Han Dong-hoon—who Yoon may have been trying to arrest last night—recently broke with the president over his refusal to allow a probe into his wife’s various scandals, such as accepting a fancy handbag (also known as a bribe in Korean political parlance) and manipulating internal polling data (this seems like a pretty stupid scandal and makes me a tiny bit sympathetic to Yoon?). Yoon himself is now the target of inquiries related to the faulty investigation of a marine’s death. Given that 60 percent of Koreans already wanted Yoon to leave office this past November, pressure on Yoon from both the PPP and DPRK to submit to various probes was only set to grow. Beyond the likelihood of being targeted by the next administration, Yoon was facing a hellish remainder of his presidency.

You might think that his background as a conservative prosecutor would have at least shielded Yoon from post-presidential witch hunt, but as one former anti-corruption prosecutor warns in his memoir, “The sword has no eyes. If you use it incorrectly, you may cut yourself.” Or, as one Korean commentator suggests even more ominously, “The sword craves blood.” (If it wasn’t already clear, the South Korean Prosecutor’s Office is serious stuff.) By some accounts, Yoon, a political novice, has been wielding the sword quite carelessly, and public sentiment turned on him well before last night’s declaration. The Prosecutor General appointed by the next president would have been unlikely to hold back.

Perhaps the big picture is that there is a particularly vicious cycle of retaliatory investigations right now in Korea, and with two politicized justice departments, it wasn’t likely to change in Yoon’s wake, much less during the remainder of his presidency.

So even by the standards of the typical sitting Korean president, Yoon looked pretty cooked. He probably hoped he could get ahead of the fate bestowed on all South Korean presidents by going for an executive Hail Mary. But this one, like most, touched the turf.

Now that Yoon is definitely going to get arrested, he can at least take solace in one fact: arrested ex-presidents in South Korea tend to get pardoned.