Why Yoon staged a coup that lasted less than 160 minutes

I wasn’t worried much when the photos and videos of military personnel and vehicles (even choppers) being deployed to the National Assembly spread quickly on social media after President Yoon declared martial law:

Although I still believe in the strength of Korean democracy, my doubts about the competences of the involved institutions including the president himself weighed most heavily.

The military wasn’t prepared for this kind of operation—a very limited number of military forces were on the move—and the soldiers at the scene were not keen to enforce an unjustifiable martial law as the footage of the spec-ops soldiers being humiliated by the angry citizens show.

The constitution is crystal clear that the president can’t declare and sustain martial law alone. As soon as a quorum of lawmakers gathers, the legislature can lift martial law as it was proven so—the martial law’s shelf life was about 155 minutes.

Every bit of circumstances screams the question:

Why? why the hell?

Such an end was so obvious from the beginning. Is this part of an ongoing conspiracy, as some would like to believe? Let’s listen to his own words:

Dear fellow citizens, I hereby declare martial law to protect the free Republic of Korea from the threat of North Korean communist forces, to root out at once the shameless pro-North anti-state forces who are plundering our people’s freedom and happiness, and to safeguard our free constitutional order.

Um, I think we need Hanron’s razor here. Yoon’s sense of reality is way more warped than I imagined. Actually, Yoon’s previous remarks hinted this—I just didn’t know it was this skewed.

One of the first things Yoon did after the election was moving the presidential office from the Blue House to Yongsan. While agreeing in theory the need for relocation, many including me were scratching their heads with such a haste. Word on the street is Yoon believes the Blue House is so wiretapped by North Korean spies that he doesn’t want to work from there even for a day.

More recently, former National Assembly Speaker Kim Jin-pyo shared his flabbergasting exchange regarding the 2022 Itaewon stampede with Yoon in his memoir. According to Kim, Yoon suspected that the incident might have been orchestrated by “certain forces,” one of the conspiracy theories typically found in far-right YouTube channels.

It is well known that Yoon gets easily agitated when he doesn’t like the advice he is just given. No surprises that there was no one left to stop Yoon from shooting himself in the foot.

What will follow

There is no other way out: Yoon’s got to go. He doesn’t look like someone who would step down on his own, so an impeachment would be the only possibility.

The Minjoo Party has been pushing for impeaching Yoon for a while, but there had been little momentum. Its leader Lee Jae-myung is not that popular and is fighting a series of uphill legal battles. Minjoo’s impeachment campaign, including its latest move to impeach prosecutors, was more of Lee’s legal strategy to delay the final court ruling as much as possible—just like Trump’s.

Yoon has just delivered the best momentum Lee could ever yearned for. While prior scandals involving Yoon and First Lady Kim appeared to fall short of Constitutional Court’s impeachment threshold, the current circumstances—treason included—present a stronger case.

With Yoon ousted, Lee Jae-myung is most likely to be the next president. Minjoo has few contenders inside: Kim Dong-yeon is spineless (there are interesting stories about what happened between Kim and the Gyeonggi province officials hired by his predecessor Lee Jae-myung), Kim Bu-gyeom lacks a foothold yet.

Conservatives would need more time for soul searching. The past seven years since Park’s impeachment wasn’t enough obviously. As usual, its current leader Han Dong-hoon is being dragged by situation, not knowing when and how to take initiative.

One uncertainty factor is the vacancy in the Constitutional Court. 3 out of 9 judges need to be nominated by the national assembly and then granted by… the president. If the impeachment process stays longer in limbo than expected, Lee’s court case might bring some surprise.


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