Divided House: S. Korea’s democracy is in deep trouble

My South Korean parents and I have a great relationship. They have embraced my same-sex marriage — an unusually progressive attitude in our country — and joined my husband and me on trips. We can openly discuss just about anything.

Except Korean politics.

They are convinced that Yoon Suk Yeol, South Korea’s conservative former president, did the right thing in December when, while in office, he tried to impose martial law and arrest opposition politicians. His move threw the nation into crisis, another chapter in the intense and often pointless political antagonism that has engulfed the country in recent years.

When I called my parents the day after Yoon’s failed attempt, that irreconcilable national divide was evident even in my otherwise harmonious family: I condemned the blatantly undemocratic power grab, which revived grim memories of past military rule; my father praised it as necessary to rein in the opposition, which he views as pro-North Korea.

Yoon’s half-baked plot fizzled within hours. He was swiftly impeached and suspended from office. A ruling on Friday by the nation’s Constitutional Court made his removal permanent.

The failure of Yoon’s bizarre scheme has been hailed in South Korea and abroad as a triumph for democracy. There is nothing to celebrate here. South Korea is as divided as ever, and the whole affair should stand as a stark warning for democracies everywhere about what happens when political polarization spirals out of control.

South Korean politics has long been plagued by a deep rift that stems largely from the decades-long division of the Korean Peninsula between North and South. This split South Koreans into two opposing political camps — an anti-Communist one led by an authoritarian elite that favours a hard line against North Korea, and a leftist, pro-democracy camp that advocates working toward reconciliation with Pyongyang.

After decades of military dictatorship, South Korea finally achieved full democracy in 1987, and the nation prospered. But that basic underlying fault line has widened to the point that the two parties that now dominate politics — Yoon’s right-wing People Power Party and the center-left opposition Democratic Party of Korea — view each other as enemies locked in a fight to the death. Yoon is just the latest in a long line of presidents brought down in this “Game of Thrones” environment.

The realization is dawning here that we may no longer even be living in a real democracy. In the wake of the martial law fiasco, Choi Jang-jip, a renowned scholar of Korean democracy, described South Korea as a “democracy without politics,” whose parties are in a state of “quasi-civil war,” and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s global democracy index lowered South Korea in February from a “full democracy” to a “flawed” one. Yoon’s nonsensical excuse for what he did illustrates how democracy has lost its meaning here: He says he sought to break the “legislative dictatorship” of the Democratic Party, which thwarted his agenda at every turn — in short, destroying democracy in order to save it.

Predictably, surveys show South Koreans have low levels of faith in the political system and the news media’s impartiality, which drives people to online sources like YouTube, where they gorge on fake news in their echo chambers.

Rather than jolt the country off this dead-end path, the Yoon saga has only further divided Koreans. For weeks while the Constitutional Court deliberated, the us-versus-them hostility played out on the streets in almost daily protests in which each side demonized the other. In addition to the generational divide seen in my family, South Koreans are split along gender lines: Demonstrations against Yoon have been notable for the many young women in their ranks, while young men seem inordinately drawn to pro-Yoon rallies. As a headline in a leading newspaper put it in March, “Families, Lovers and Friends Are Divided” over the affair.

New elections must be held within 60 days of the Constitutional Court ruling. But changing who’s in charge is unlikely to get the failing political establishment to set aside its inane squabbling and address urgent national concerns like a housing affordability crisis or how to navigate a dangerous world that President Trump is only making worse.

Polls indicate that a solid majority of South Koreans want a change of government. This is likely to favour the Democratic Party, whose leader, Lee Jae-myung, has been the driving force in frustrating Yoon in Parliament. As a result, Lee is reviled by the conservative camp. He was nearly killed last year by a knife-wielding man — who was radicalized by the nation’s politics — and has been indicted on bribery and other criminal charges by Yoon’s justice department.

The rot in South Korean politics is too deep to be cured by a single court ruling or election. If the country’s politicians and electorate can’t learn to reflect, talk and compromise, the 'Game of Thrones' will rumble on, and democracy will wither away.

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