South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol rose from star prosecutor to the presidency in just a few years, but after a bungled martial law decree last year, he could on Friday become the country’s second president to be booted from office.
The lurch back to South Korea’s dark days of military rule on December 3 only lasted a few hours, and after a night of protests and high drama, Yoon was forced into a U-turn by lawmakers.
He was swiftly impeached, and after weeks of hearings and deliberations, the country’s Constitutional Court will on Friday announce whether to uphold parliament’s censure and strip him of office or overturn the ruling.
Yoon has remained defiant throughout.
He was detained in January in a dawn raid after holding out against police and prosecutors for weeks, becoming the first sitting South Korean president to be arrested — although he was later released on procedural grounds.
Grew up in dictatorship
Born in Seoul in 1960, months before a military coup, Yoon studied law and went on to become a public prosecutor and anti-corruption crusader.
He played an instrumental role in Park Geun-hye, South Korea’s first female president, being impeached in 2016 and later convicted for abuse of power and imprisoned.
As the country’s top prosecutor in 2019, he also indicted a senior aide of Park’s successor, Moon Jae-in, in a fraud and bribery case.
The conservative People Power Party (PPP), in opposition at the time, liked what they saw and convinced Yoon to become their presidential candidate.
He won in March 2022, beating Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party, but by the narrowest margin in South Korean history.
If he is removed from office Friday, it would trigger fresh elections within 60 days — with Lee currently the frontrunner.
Halloween to handbag
Yoon was never much loved by the public, especially by women — he vowed on the campaign trail to abolish the ministry of gender equality — and scandals have come thick and fast.
They include his administration’s handling of a 2022 crowd crush during Halloween festivities that killed more than 150 people.
Voters have also blamed Yoon’s administration for inflation, a lagging economy, and increasing constraints on freedom of speech.
He was accused of abusing presidential vetoes, notably to strike down a bill paving the way for a special investigation into alleged stock manipulation by his wife, Kim Keon Hee.
Yoon’s reputation was further hit in 2023 when his wife was secretly filmed accepting a designer handbag worth $2,000 as a gift. Yoon insisted it would have been rude to refuse.
His mother-in-law, Choi Eun-soon, was sentenced to one year in prison for forging financial documents in a real estate deal. She was released in May 2024.
‘You can sing’
As president, Yoon has maintained a tough stance against nuclear-armed North Korea and bolstered ties with Seoul’s traditional ally, the United States.
In 2023, he sang Don McLean’s “American Pie” at the White House, prompting US President Joe Biden to respond: “I had no damn idea you could sing.”
But his efforts to restore ties with South Korea’s former colonial ruler, Japan, did not sit well with many at home.
Yoon has been a lame duck president since the opposition Democratic Party won a majority in parliamentary elections in April last year.
In his televised address declaring martial law, Yoon railed against “anti-state elements plundering people’s freedom and happiness”, and his office has subsequently cast the move as a bid to break legislative gridlock.
But to use his political difficulties as justification for imposing martial law for the first time in South Korea since the 1980s was absurd, an analyst said.
It would be “difficult for the court to reject the impeachment on legal grounds, as his rationale for declaring martial law was clearly in breach of legality”, said Yoo Jung-hoon, an attorney and political commentator.
Yoon invoked Article 77 of the South Korean constitution, which allows for proclaiming martial law but is reserved for ‘time of war, armed conflict or similar national emergency’
“He himself admitted that the decree was intended as a warning to the opposition, an argument that does not constitute a legal basis for justified martial law,” Yoo said.
