Move to impeach president?
With the conservatives given a gigantic thumbs down in last week’s elections, everyone is now wondering whether the progressives might try to impeach the president.
The threat came up during the campaign, and the people making it will be taking a majority of the seats in the National Assembly, the body tasked with striking the first blow in any impeachment process. It happened seven years ago. Could it happen again?
If it does, how are we to understand it? How may we know if impeaching President Yoon Suk Yeol would be a good thing or a bad thing?
I ask this not as a lead into an opinion one way or another but rather to pre-emptively clear away some of the fog that will inevitably gather around news coverage about this as it travels overseas.
There are two sources of confusion for outsiders. One concerns the political affiliation of the parties involved. The other concerns the legality of impeachment.
People overseas who follow Korea consider the president and his People Power Party to be “conservative” and the opposition Democratic Party of Korea to be “progressive.” They do this because these are the words the foreign press uses, and they use them because we use them in Korea.
This is unfortunate because the ruling party people are not conservative, and their opponents are not progressive in the sense that these words are understood in English-speaking countries.
This simple fact is seldom observed. But it has serious consequences in opinion formation overseas, especially as people in these days of Donald Trump and diversity, equity and inclusion tend to be far more tribal than they used to be. Conservatives in America, for example, used to marry progressives and vice versa. Now, they don’t. For these people, the fate of a conservative president in a foreign country is either good or bad according to their domestic preference.
This was very observable seven years ago when then-President Park Geun-hye was impeached and sentenced to 20 years in prison. It was very difficult for foreign liberals and progressives to even listen to arguments in her favor because they thought she was a conservative.
I won’t belabor this point, except to say that the issue that separates the two camps in Korean politics is unification. Stated simply, one camp believes South Korea has established the model for a future unified state and, when it’s ready and if it behaves itself, North Korea can join. The other camp believes both Koreas are imperfect and that the future unified state will be a new entity and are impatient to midwife it.
On social and economic issues like education, health care, gay marriage, abortion, immigration, tax, labor, foreign investment, climate change and others, they’re not philosophically at odds with one another. The tendency is to do what is best for the economy or, failing clarity there, see what the other side wants and then oppose it.
As to the legal question of impeachment, the first thing someone from a democratic country will ask is, what did the president do wrong?
They will wonder, is the president incapacitated? Has he committed treason? Are his crimes so unspeakable that he no longer has authority?
They won’t realize that, for us here, the relationship between law and politics is a little different. Korea is, of course, a lawbased democracy. But not entirely. The justice system is one of the sectors that has least developed with democracy. The reason the president’s opponents will try to impeach him is because they are impatient for power and can cut short his term. Their challenge is to find some pretext in law.
If you don’t believe me, try asking a politician or a political reporter whether they think the president will be impeached. Their explanation will not be based in law or ethics. It will be the answer of an engineer. You will hear the specs of the Assembly, about what it would take for a dozen PPP lawmakers to join the opposition and vote against Yoon in their own political interest.
Why would they do this, then? The answer lies in their conviction that democracy doesn’t mean ruling by the consent of the people as much as actually doing the will of the people. The missing ingredient is a million people out on the street protesting against the government. If an issue arises where his opponents can pull that off, he’s done for.