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For the fourth time this month, South Korea’s parliament has become the arena for a rancorous battle for the country’s political future.
Safeguarding the hard-won rights and freedoms South Koreans have enjoyed for almost four decades is a lofty aim – and supported by the vast majority of voters – but the scenes inside the national assembly have been a reminder of how thin the line can be between democracy and rule by force.
The latest twist in a saga that began after darkness on 3 December – when the then president, Yoon Suk Yeol, imposed martial law and triggered a confrontation between MPs and troops inside the national assembly building – came on Friday, when the man who replaced Yoon met the same fate and was removed from power.
Han Duck-soo’s impeachment comes a fortnight after opposition MPs, helped by a dozen rebellious members of Yoon’s governing People Power party, threw Yoon out of office at the second time of asking. A week earlier, an initial attempt to impeach Yoon failed after his party boycotted the vote, leaving the chamber without enough votes to secure the required two-thirds majority.
Then, on Friday, Han paid the same price for his alleged involvement in what opposition MPs routinely refer to as Yoon’s ill-fated “insurrection”.
The aftermath of South Korea’s six-hour descent into its authoritarian past is couched in legal terminology and complicated procedure: now that parliament has done its bit, the focus will return to the constitutional court.
In more normal times, six of the court’s nine justices have to approve parliament’s impeachment vote for Yoon to be removed from office, triggering an election that must be held within 60 days of their ruling.
But as the past month has taught South Koreans and their increasingly concerned allies in Washington and elsewhere, the workings of the country’s highest court are as vulnerable to uncertainty as the machinations of its hot-tempered parliament.
The court’s current composition – only six justices – is a key factor in Friday’s vote to oust Han, who must now bear the ignominy of becoming the first acting South Korean president to be impeached. It was his refusal to approve three opposition-approved nominees to complete the nine-member bench, a move he said needed bipartisan agreement, that sealed his fate.
Han, who had served as prime minister before Yoon, himself makes way for a temporary successor, the finance minister, Choi Sang-mok, as parliament moves further down the pecking order to fill the country’s leadership vacuum.
Despite Friday’s drama surrounding Han, Yoon remains the chief protagonist in this volatile political drama. How the court will rule on his impeachment at the end of its 180-day deadline is uncertain.
The swift appointment of new justices to replace the three who departed in October at the end of their terms could increase the chances that Yoon will be found guilty of the charge that he violated the constitution through his martial law declaration and subsequent actions.
But the failure to put new justices in place, with the decision on Yoon’s fate left to the current six, would dramatically raise the stakes, as their decision would have to be unanimous. Just one dissenting voice would see Yoon reinstated.
With the court’s deliberations taking place alongside a separate criminal investigation into Yoon and his associates – while citizens continue to brave freezing temperatures to call on their representatives to salvage something approaching stability – it is hard to imagine that the coming weeks will be any less tumultuous than the past month.
But for millions of exhausted South Koreans, the country’s most senior legal minds must succeed where so many of their politicians have conspicuously failed.