SEOUL – In an era of rising authoritarianism, at the heels of a six-hour martial law decree that unfolded while many South Koreans slept, something noteworthy happened: Democracy held.
The past week in Seoul, officials and academics warn, is what a threat to democracy looks like in 2024. It's a democratically elected president declaring martial law over the nation he leads, asserting sweeping powers to prevent opposition demonstrations, ban political parties and control the media. It's members of the military attempting to block lawmakers from exercising their power to vote on cancelling the power grab.
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And here's what it took to defeat President Yoon Suk Yeol 's lurch toward government by force:
Unified popular support for democracy. Legislators storming the National Assembly past midnight, live-streaming themselves climbing over fences. A politician grabbing at a soldier's rifle and yelling “Aren't you ashamed?” until he retreated. And finally, decisively, Parliament assembling a quorum and voting unanimously to cancel martial law.
It was a victory for a hard-won democracy — and for the idea that checks and balances among branches of government must work to counteract each other's ambitions, as the American founders wrote in the Federalist Papers in 1788.
But as the drama played out in Seoul, the scaffolding of democracy rattled around the world.
It said something about the rule of law
In other countries, the grab for power might have worked. Other would-be authoritarians might have been better prepared than Yoon.
In deeply polarized societies — the United States, for example, where Republicans are staunchly loyal to president-elect Donald Trump — there might not have been decisive support from the public or the opposition. The military might have used force. And the members of the legislature might not have voted as one to snuff out the attempted takeover.
“President Yoon's attempt to declare martial law reveals the fragility of the rule of law in divided societies, especially those with governments in which the chief executive cannot be easily dismissed by the legislature," said Tom Pepinsky, a government professor at Cornell University who studies backsliding among democracies in Southeast Asia.
Notably, he said in an email, “No members of President Yoon’s own party were willing to defend his actions in public."
Nevertheless, Yoon’s surprise attempt to impose martial law revealed both the fragility and resilience of the country’s democratic system.
Within three hours of his stunning announcement to impose military rule — claiming the opposition was “paralyzing” state affairs — 190 lawmakers voted to cancel his actions. In so doing, they demonstrated the strength of the country’s democratic checks and balances.
Yoon’s authoritarian push, carried out by hundreds of heavily armed troops with Blackhawk helicopters and armored vehicles sent to the National Assembly, harked back to an era of dictatorial presidents. The country’s democratic transition in the late 1980s came after years of massive protests by millions that eventually overcame violent suppressions by military rulers.
Civilian presence was again crucial in shaping the events following Yoon’s late night television announcement on Tuesday. Thousands of people flocked to the National Assembly, shouting slogans for martial law to be lifted and Yoon to step down from power. There were no reports of violent clashes with troops and police officers.
“We restored democracy without having a single casualty this time,” said Seol Dong-hoon, a sociology professor at South Korea’s Jeonbuk National University.
It's not that easy to become a dictator
It’s virtually impossible for any leader of a democracy to pull off a transition toward martial law without a public willing to support it, or at least tolerate it.
Opposition leader Lee Jae-myung, who narrowly lost to Yoon in the 2022 presidential election, attracted millions of views as he began live-streaming his journey to the National Assembly, pleading for people to converge on the parliament to help lawmakers get inside. The shaky footage later shows him exiting his car climbing over a fence to get onto the grounds.
The vote at the National Assembly was also broadcast live on the YouTube channel of Assembly Speaker Woo Won Shik, who also had to scale a fence to get in.
Yoon’s sense of crisis clearly wasn’t shared by the public, whose opinions, Seol said, were shaped predominantly by the shocking videos broadcast to their devices.
“Ultimately, democracy is all about moving public opinion,” he said. “What was most crucial in this case was that everything was broadcast live on smartphones, YouTube and countless other media.”
Opposition lawmakers are now pushing to impeach Yoon, saying he failed to meet the constitutional requirement that martial law should only be considered in wartime or a comparable severe crisis — and that he unlawfully deployed troops to the National Assembly.
On Saturday, an opposition-led impeachment motion failed after most lawmakers from Yoon’s party boycotted the vote. Yet the president’s troubles persist: The vote’s defeat is expected to intensify nationwide protests and deepen South Korea’s political turmoil, with opposition parties preparing to introduce another impeachment motion when parliament reconvenes on Wednesday.
Han Sang-hie, a law professor at Seoul’s Konkuk University, said the martial law debacle highlights what he sees as the most crucial flaw of South Korea’s democracy: that it places too much power in the hands of the president, which is easily abused and often goes unchecked.
It's called a ‘self-coup’
Political scientists call what happened in South Korea an “autogolpe” — a “self-coup” — defined as one led by incumbent leaders themselves, in which an executive takes or sponsors illegal actions against others in the government. Yoon qualifies because he used troops to try to shut down South Korea's legislature.
Self-coups are increasing, with a third of the 46 since 1945 occurring in the past decade, according to a study by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Penn State University. About 80% of self-coups succeed, they reported.
In 2021, a power grab by Tunisian President Kais Saied raised similar concerns around the world after the country designed a democracy from scratch and won a Nobel Peace Prize after a largely bloodless revolution.
In the United States, some have expresed worry about similar situations arising during the second administration of Donald Trump. He has vowed, after all, to shake some of democracy's pillars. He's mused that he would be justified if he decided to pursue “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” That’s in contrast to the oath of office he took in 2017, and will again next year, to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” as best he can.
Nearly half of voters in the Nov. 5 election, which Trump won, said they were “very concerned” that another Trump presidency would bring the U.S. closer to authoritarianism, according to AP Votecast survey data.
Asked before a live audience on Fox News Channel in 2023 to assure Americans that he would not abuse power or use the presidency to seek retribution against anyone, Trump replied, “except for day one," when he'll close the border and “drill, drill, drill.”
After that, Trump said, "I'm not a dictator.”
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Kellman reported from London.