 "South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is set to face his second impeachment. AP")
The second impeachment of South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol is slated for tomorrow (14 December).
Yoon narrowly survived an impeachment attempt last week after members of his People Power Party (PPP) boycotted the motion.
The president, who had apologised profusely for ‘inconveniencing’ the public after martial law was briefly imposed, had changed tack.
Yoon is now defending his actions and pledging to ‘fight till the end.’
The main opposition Democratic Party slammed Yoon’s speech as “an expression of extreme delusion” and “false propaganda.”
The opposition-controlled parliament also passed motions Thursday to impeach and suspend Yoon’s police chief and justice minister over the imposition of martial law, escalating the pressure on Yoon’s embattled government.
But what happens if Yoon is impeached?
Let’s take a closer look:
The impeachment process
First, let’s briefly examine the impeachment process.
South Korea’s Constitution allows parliament to bring an impeachment motion against the president or other high-ranking public officials.
This, if they are believed to “have violated the Constitution or any law in the performance of official duties.”
Though the presidential impeachment motion needs a two-thirds majority vote by the members of the single-chamber parliament to pass, other officials require a simple majority.
If parliament votes to impeach, the president is suspended from exercising his powers.
As per The New York Times, the matter then goes to the Constitutional Court.
The Constitutional Court conducts a trial to either confirm or reject the impeachment motion, hearing evidence from parliament to determine whether the president violated the law.
It listens to oral arguments from the chair of parliament’s justice committee and from the public official or their legal counsel.
The Court has up to six months to confirm the impeachment by a vote of six out of the nine justices, or reject the motion.
The Court currently has six sitting justices with three posts to be filled.
It has waived the requirement of seven justices to deliberate cases, but it was not clear if it would take up the impeachment motion without the full nine justices.
The court can either uphold the impeachment or reverse it, as per Al Jazeera.
If it rejects the impeachment, the opposition can simply impeach Yoon again.
If it upholds the process, Yoon will be removed from office and Prime Minister Han Duck-soo will take over his duties.
If this happens, a new presidential election must be held within 60 days.
The same holds true if Yoon simply resigns rather than being impeached.
How do votes stack up?
Right now, it seems like the opposition has the votes to force Yoon out.
Nikkei Asia quoted the Dong-A Ilbo newspaper as reporting reported on Friday that eight members of the PPP thus far have publicly declared that they will vote for the impeachment.
The opposition Democratic Party and independents have 192 votes in Parliament.
The threshold for impeaching the president is 200 votes.
Remember, the only reason Yoon survived is because members of the PPP boycotted the impeachment vote last week.
Among those who have seemingly changed their mind is PPP MP Kim Sang-wook.
“The president is no longer qualified to lead the country, he is totally unfit,” Kim told BBC.
But Kim is paying the price.
“My party and supporters have called me a traitor,” he said, calling South Korean politics “intensely tribal.”
Others are at their wits’ end over the situation.
“We don’t even know who we are or what we stand for anymore,” one PPP official added.
“We will not disappear, but we need to rebuild ourselves from scratch,” Kim said. “There is a saying that South Korea’s economy and culture are first class, but its politics are third class. Now is the chance to reflect on that.”
The situation seems much changed from last week when Al Jazeera quoted Choo Kyung-ho, parliamentarian and floor leader of the PPP, as saying that “all 108 lawmakers of the People Power party will stay united to reject the president’s impeachment”.
As per the outlet opposition leader Lee Jae-myung of the Democratic Party is likely favoured to take over from Yoon if he is impeached.
Lee battled Yoon for the presidency in 2022 and narrowly lost.
Though PPP leader Han Dong-hoon – a rival of Yoon – in the aftermath of the vote had said Yoon would resign, he provided no timeline.
Though Han said that Yoon is playing no part in running the day-to-day affairs of the country, experts are concerned.
“There is no legal basis for this arrangement. We are in a dangerous and chaotic situation," Lim Ji-bong, a law professor at Sogang University told BBC.
In a televised speech Thursday, Yoon, a conservative, said he enacted martial law as a warning to the liberal Democratic Party. He called the party “a monster” and “anti-state forces” that he said tried to use its legislative muscle to impeach top officials, undermined the government’s budget bill for next year and sympathised with North Korea.
“I will fight to the end to prevent the forces and criminal groups that have been responsible for paralysing the country’s government and disrupting the nation’s constitutional order from threatening the future of the Republic of Korea,” Yoon said. “The opposition is now doing a sword dance of chaos, claiming that the declaration of martial law constitutes to an act of rebellion. But was it really?”
Yoon said martial law was an act of governance that cannot be the subject of investigations and doesn’t amount to rebellion. He said the deployment of nearly 300 soldiers to the National Assembly was designed to maintain order, not dissolve or paralyse it.
Yoon’s speech is expected to deepen a divide inside the PPP. When party chair Han called Yoon’s statement “a confession of rebellion” during a party meeting, Yoon loyalists angrily jeered and called on Han to stop speaking.
Han has urged party members to vote in favour of Yoon’s impeachment.
Has a South Korean president been impeached before?
Yes.
In May 2017, a presidential election was held after the Constitutional Court’s ruling to confirm then-President Park Geun-hye’s impeachment on March 9.
Park was the first democratically elected leader to be ousted from office, accused of colluding with a confidant in an influence peddling scheme and abusing her presidential authority.
Parliament voted to impeach her in December 2016.
According to Washington Post, dozens of members of Park’s own Saenuri Party, a conservative predecessor of the PPP, switched sides for the vote.
In all, 234 members of the 300-member Assembly voted to impeach Park.
Hundreds of thousands of people had also gathered in central Seoul for weeks urging Park to resign.
Park is a daughter of former president Park Chung-hee who was assassinated in 1979.
Park was later tried separately on criminal charges and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. She served almost five years before being released on medical grounds and was then pardoned in 2021.
In 2004, then-President Roh Moo-hyun was impeached on the charge of failing to maintain political neutrality as required of a high public official.
As per Washington Post, Roh was accused of a minor breach of laws by the country’s election commission.
The commission accused Roh of breaking laws that do not let presidents to campaign for legislators.
Roh was also alleged to be linked to a corruption scandal.
The motion was rejected by the Constitutional Court and Roh was restored to serve a full five-year term.
As per Washington Post, the impeachment was viewed as Roh’s political enemies were trying to stifle his agenda including a possible reconciliation with North Korea.
In his speech Thursday, Yoon said he had discussed imposing martial law only with Kim before he informed other top officials about it at a Cabinet meeting just before its declaration.
On the night of December 3, besides the National Assembly, Yoon and then defence minister Kim Yong Hyun sent troops to the National Election Commission. That raised speculation that he might have tried to seize computer servers at the commission as he believed unfounded rumours that the results of April’s parliamentary elections, in which his party suffered steep losses, were rigged.
Yoon said he asked Kim to examine the supposed vulnerabilities of the commission’s computer systems, which Yoon said was hampering the credibility of election results. He accused the commission of resisting a thorough inspection by Seoul’s spy agency following a cyberattack attributed to North Korea-backed hackers last year.
With inputs from agencies