South Korea: a right-wing coup defeated, but deeper issues unresolved

Popular protests defeated an attempted coup last December, writes Owen Miller. Yet, with an election in ten days, South Korea seems set to alternate between governments of the far right and the neoliberal centre, while serious social problems fuel the growth of conservative social movements.

It’s safe to say that when martial law was declared in South Korea at around 10.30pm on 3 December last year, it took almost the whole country by surprise, including leading members of President Yoon Suk Yeol’s own governing party. South Korea has been a democracy since 1987 and the last coup and declaration of martial law occurred during the tumultuous years of 1979-1980. For Koreans over 40, seeing special forces troops attempting to storm the parliament building while lawmakers barricaded themselves inside was a shocking flashback to the violence, fear and repression of their youth. For younger Koreans the sense of something thought to be long dead coming back to haunt a new generation caused feelings of deep fear, uncertainty and anger. The attempted auto-coup by the president was defeated by people power as thousands came onto the streets of Seoul in the middle of the night to prevent the parliament being seized and lawmakers arrested. The aftermath of the coup attempt saw a huge political crisis as President Yoon dug in and refused to step down, but eventually on 4 April South Korea’s constitutional court ruled in favour of Yoon’s impeachment and he was forced from office. Now the country faces a presidential election on 3 June, in an uncanny rerun of events that occurred only nine years ago in 2017, when former conservative president Park Geun-hye was impeached.

Korea’s history – partition, then industrialisation

Before looking in more detail at what has happened over recent months and what is likely to happen next, it is worth having a brief look back at Korea’s modern history. The country had been an independent kingdom for many centuries, but in 1910 it became a Japanese colony after Japan defeated Russia for control of the territory in 1905. In August 1945, Korea was liberated from Japanese colonial rule, but immediately reoccupied by the two emerging superpowers. The US suggested the partition of the peninsula just before Japan’s surrender – the Soviets occupying the North and the US occupying the South – and Stalin accepted it. The temporary partition very rapidly became a permanent division of the country, much against the wishes and expectations of all Koreans. The US-occupied southern zone saw the emergence of a pro-American leader, Syngman Rhee, basically the first dictator of South Korea up until 1960.

In 1960 South Korea had its first revolution. When I say revolution I’m talking about a political revolution in which the existing regime is overthrown, not a broader social revolution. Syngman Rhee’s hated dictatorship was toppled by a youth-led explosion on the streets and replaced with a new constitutional government. However, the following year, in 1961, there was a military coup. Current events echo 1961, and people feel very scared by this – many people who are alive today have lived through this kind of thing before. After the coup a military strong man, General Park Chung Hee, took over and ruled until 1979 when he was assassinated by the chief of his own intelligence service. The 1960s and 70s were the period of the ‘Korean miracle’ – very rapid industrial development on the basis of a brutal, authoritarian state. The military dictatorship continued until 1987, but what’s important is that in 1980 there was a major pro-democracy uprising in a city called Gwangju. It was attacked by special forces troops – paratroopers – who came and brutalised and killed a large number of civilians. As a result the whole city rose up against the state and the military – it became radicalised beyond just calling for democracy, they forced the military out, took over the town and established a sort of commune that lasted for about 10 days before they were defeated.

1987 – uprising brings democracy

During the 1980s the democracy movement in South Korea really took off. This eventually led to a mass uprising centered in Seoul, the capital, in 1987. I would say this was the second big political revolution in South Korea’s history. This people’s uprising overthrew the military dictatorship and brought back direct presidential elections. It marked the beginning of democratisation, but when formal democratic institutions are reinstated that doesn’t mean that the task of installing liberal democracy is over. All the reactionary forces that were there under the dictatorship were still there, all their interests were still there, so since 1987 there has been an ongoing struggle over the soul of South Korea. On the one side you have civil society and some liberal bourgeois forces, along with more radical forces who have been fighting to preserve and extend those democratic gains. On the other side there have been forces linked to the old authoritarian regimes – big capital, parts of the military and security services and so on – that want to roll back a lot of those democratic gains. What’s happened most recently with President Yoon is part of that story of push and pull. In that sense, the current situation represents quite an extreme version of a process that has been ongoing for almost four decades in South Korea.

However, it is unprecedented for there to be such a push back against democratic gains – there hasn’t been another coup attempt since 1987, and since then South Korean society has changed immensely. You saw, particularly in the early 1990s, the burgeoning of a mass workers movement which was able to completely change the working conditions and pay of Korean workers. Industrial workers in Korea had their wages and conditions upgraded within the space of a few years. It changed South Korean capitalism and shifted it towards a more consumption-based economy, while at the same time, the country had to acclimatise to the global shift towards neoliberalism and globalisation.

Ultra-neoliberalism and low growth in the 21st century

Then in the 21st century, there has been a big change in the character of South Korean society. It shifted from being very much a developmental state based on state-led growth, full employment to being a sort of ultra-neoliberal, ultra-competitive society with relatively low growth. Long gone now are the days when Korea was having 10 or 12 per cent growth a year – now it has annual GDP growth similar to Britain. It is now a very high pressure society where young people struggle to get a foothold or to maintain the living standards achieved by their parents during the high-growth years. One of the features of all this which people may know about is that South Korea now has world record low birth rates. These are so low that the population is now actually shrinking, and it is thought that by the year 2100 it could be less than half the size it is now.

During the last 15 years we’ve seen in South Korean politics some of the same things that have been happening in quite a lot of countries in the post-2008 crisis world: the decomposition of classic liberal bourgeois politics and various kinds of strange phenomena, such as the rise of demagogic characters on the far right. An early example of that was the election in 2013 of President Park Geun-hye. She was the first female president of South Korea, but she was also the daughter of the dictator Park Chung Hee, so the election represented a nostalgic turn back towards authoritarian rule. She was impeached in 2017 after massive street protests – once again people came onto the streets to defend democracy in the face of attacks. This is often referred to in South Korea as the Candlelight Revolution because people carried candles at these demonstrations, but there was no attempt after this to make any constitutional changes or introduce real change to the party system. Essentially the country returned to the pre-existing political system where you alternate between a right-wing conservative bourgeois party and a more centrist, liberal bourgeois party. In that sense, South Korean politics have become quite like the US: there is no mainstream party with any roots in workers’ organisations, just two parties representing capital in different ways.

Yoon elected in 2022, repeats far-right talking points

After Park’s 2017 impeachment a liberal president, Moon Jae-in, ruled the country for five years and – somewhat inevitably – disappointed a large proportion of those who had voted for him, expecting social and political reforms. Then, in May 2022, the conservative Yoon Suk Yeol, a former prosecutor who had pursued ministers in the previous administration, was narrowly elected. During the campaign he’d taken on disturbing far right talking points to build a base, including open misogyny that built his popularity among right wing-leaning young men, as well as playing to anti-Chinese feeling. He proved to be quite unpopular from early on. The South Korean economy had been struggling and he didn’t have any solutions for that. There was also a terrible disaster in October that year, when over a hundred people died in an alleyway in Seoul, crushed in a crowd celebrating Halloween. The way his government dealt with that made him even less popular.

Then in April 2024 there were the legislative elections for the National Assembly. South Korea has a system like the US: you have a presidential election and then a couple of years later you have a legislative election, so it tends to create a situation where you have a president and a National Assembly completely at loggerheads with one another, and the president becomes a lame duck for the last couple of years of their time in power. Yoon was decisively defeated by the Democratic Party in the 2024 National Assembly Election last year and that was really the beginning of his coup plot. Yoon clearly has some personality issues in addition to his right wing populist politics; I suspect, like Trump, he’s a narcissist. He just couldn’t contemplate the fact that he was going to be a lame duck and he began to put in place plans to overturn the opposition-dominated legislature.

December 2024 – coup attempt and popular resistance

So it was that on the evening of 3 December, Yoon made a televised address. He said that he was declaring martial law to deal with what he called ‘anti-state forces’ or ‘pro-north Korean forces’. This is where North Korea comes into it, because right-wing governments in South Korea always use Red Scare tactics. In fact, it is so standard that everyone more or less expects it and many people just shrug their shoulders at it. He said he was bringing in martial law to save the country, and he then sent in Special Forces troops to various locations, including the National Assembly and the National Electoral Commission. He sent soldiers to the Electoral Commission because he was obsessed with right-wing conspiracies spouted by right-wing YouTubers who had been claiming that the National Assembly elections had been interfered with – possibly by ‘the Chinese’. Yoon therefore wanted to go to the commission to either find or plant evidence for this conspiracy theory.

The reaction of ordinary Koreans was to be absolutely shocked – they found it quite incredible to think that something like this could happen in 21st century Korea. Almost 40 something years after the transition to democracy people couldn’t believe it, although in fact a small number of opposition lawmakers had been predicting it and they were proved to be right.

However, the coup attempt went wrong almost from the beginning for Yoon. First, he sent police to seal off the National Assembly, but the police didn’t do a good job of it – they probably felt uncomfortable about it. The lawmakers, when they heard of this coup attempt, streamed back to the National Assembly and got in, even climbing over the fences. Then when the special forces troops finally arrived on the scene after delays, they were hesitant about actually going in and following the president’s orders, which were to drag out, tie up and arrest a list of key opposition lawmakers. This level of hesitation meant that the National Assembly was able to convene with a quorate number of lawmakers, and they were able to vote down the martial law declaration. Eventually in the early hours of the morning, Yoon gave in and said that he would withdraw the martial law, so the coup was defeated. One reason for that was that quite a lot of the military were not really prepared to go through with it. It’s a long time since South Korea was a military dictatorship and the whole role of the military in Korean society is quite different now. Yoon had assumed that they would just follow his orders, but it seems as though the lower officers and the soldiers on the ground were not so happy to go through with that.

Outside the National Assembly, hundreds of citizens had arrived in the middle of the night to defend it. The staff working in the Assembly came out to defend it, so there were various scuffles going on in and around the building. It was incredibly moving and exciting to watch as this was livestreamed around the world. There is now a particularly famous image of Ahn Gwi-ryeong – a woman who works for the Democratic Party – confronting one of the special forces soldiers in front of the National Assembly. You can see her grabbing the muzzle of his automatic rifle, turning it aside and shouting at him. The soldiers were faced with ordinary citizens and lawmakers physically confronting them even though they were heavily armed and this paralyzed the soldiers to quite a large extent. They did go into the National Assembly but in the end they retreated well before Yoon declared martial law over. 

Crisis continues after the coup attempt

The coup was overturned, but that wasn’t the end of the crisis. It has continued to rumble on for months, with failed attempts to arrest President Yoon, shocking street violence from his far-right supporters and then the long-delayed ruling from the Constitutional Court on his impeachment. In the end it did go the way many had expected and Yoon Suk Yeol was formally impeached and forced to step down on 4 April, much to the visible relief of millions of Koreans. Now the country faces a snap presidential election on 3 June which the opposition leader of the Democratic Party, Lee Jae Myung, is almost certain to win. But even the path to the election has not been smooth. The current ruling party, the conservative (but oddly named) People Power Party, has been desperate to avoid a repeat of 2017 when it lost badly to the Democratic Party candidate Moon Jae In after the impeachment of Park Geun Hye. To that end, the PPP and its cronies in the judicial system have tried to find ways to exclude Lee from the ballot, including a ruling by the Supreme Court on 1 May this year that Lee’s successful appeal against a conviction for a relatively minor electoral law violation should be overturned and his case re-tried. It was thought that the ruling would bar Lee Jae Myung from standing, but the case has now gone to the Seoul High Court, which has opted to hold the trial well after the presidential election, effectively allowing Lee to stand unhindered.

Although the forces of reaction have been pushed back for the time being and the coup attempt defeated by mass popular defence of democracy, just as in 2017, there has been no revolution in South Korea. This was a defensive movement that succeeded in defending the existing democratic system but has not been able to move beyond that to demand further political or social reforms that South Korea desperately needs to deal with its numerous social problems and forestall the rise of the far right.

The growth of the far right

What sort of political landscape exists in South Korea now? Yoon’s coup attempt didn’t happen in a vacuum. The landscape is quite different to the old days of authoritarian politics before 1987, because Yoon does have a following, he does have people coming out onto the streets in their thousands to support him. The numbers the far right can muster are nowhere near as big as the pro-democracy protests but still worryingly large. One of the main constituencies supporting the far right in South Korea is retired people. They’re often also evangelical Christians, very socially conservative, and very anti-LGBT. They tend to get their news from far-right YouTubers and there are stories of people in that age bracket who are literally spending hours and hours every day watching YouTube, consuming anti-Chinese conspiracies, misogynistic content and so on, produced by people like the evangelical pastor Jeon Kwang-hoon. They tend to believe that the country is either being taken over by the Chinese, by the Chinese Communist Party, or it’s under threat from pro-North Korean forces or the far left. Anti-communism has never gone away in South Korea and it’s still one of the key touchstones of the right. The role of evangelical Christian churches is very important on the right in South Korea. We’ve seen the same kind of thing in South America with the spread of evangelism and the effect it has on pulling politics to the right in places like Brazil with the rise of Bolsonaro. In both cases these churches are closely linked to the right-wing Protestant movement in the US. They are very important as an organizing force in South Korea because they can get lots of people out onto the streets.

Another constituency of Yoon and the far right is young men who feel deeply dissatisfied with South Korean society with its ultra-competitive, winner-loser culture. South Korea has had a pretty rapid transition from being a very traditionalist Confucian patriarchal society to being neoliberal and individualistic. Men haven’t lost their privileges – it’s still absolutely a patriarchal society – but even the perceived loss of some privileges seems to be enough to motivate these men in their misogynistic views. They also tend to be strongly anti-Chinese and there have been recent racist street demonstrations, including one by male university students in mid-April, marching through Chinese neighborhoods of Seoul chanting racist slogans. All in all, there now appears to space for fascist movement to develop in South Korea, and both the parliamentary right and the Christian far right are experimenting with elements of fascist politics that have not been very prominent in South Korea before, including xenophobia, Sinophobia, misogynism and viciously anti-LGBT views.

The weakness of the left

What about the other side of the political spectrum? The Democratic Party, the main opposition party in South Korea, is not a left-wing party. It descends from the democratic opposition of the dictatorship days but it does not have any working-class base or reformist policies in the strict sense. In fact, it is a party with certain similarities to the US Democrats. There have been long running attempts to form a sort of social democratic party or a labour party in South Korea. The most successful incarnation of that was founded 25 years ago – the Korean Democratic Labour Party – but it already began to splinter into various parts in 2008. More recently, the main left electoral party in the National Assembly is called the Justice Party – its politics are centrist, maybe a little bit to the left of our Labour Party. There is also quite a vibrant pro-democracy civil society – a non-party social movement left with big organisations which can get masses of people out onto the streets. They were key to building the huge pro-democracy rallies of the last few months which sometimes attracted over a million people. The radical left is small, and just as divided as in Britain – there’s been a long-running rift on the left between those who are more pro-North Korean and those who reject any support for North Korea.

When it comes to organised labour, the unions are still quite radical in their approach, and they’re not shy of getting involved in politics. They can call general strikes but their actual ability to impact national politics is relatively limited because union density is quite low. So, while they often appear radical, they’re not that powerful. The last 20 years in South Korea have seen a significant decline in the student movement, which was absolutely the backbone of the left in South Korea. It was once very radical, very prepared to go on the streets, fight the police, be sent to jail, and generally do whatever was necessary. That student politics has dissipated, which is quite worrying because now you can have these big pro-democracy mass movements and people coming onto the streets in their hundreds of thousands, in 2016-17 and again no in 2024-25, but there isn’t much of a backbone to it in the student movement or the labour movement. It tends to just blow up quickly into a big movement, and then – as in 2017 after mass protests got Park impeached – it disappears completely and the main legacy is another centrist government.

The far right facing defeat, but deeper issues unresolved

Currently, the Democratic Party presidential candidate Lee Jae Myung is far ahead, polling consistently around 50 percent of the electorate with the candidate of Yoon’s party (PPP) getting the support of around a third of voters. It seems almost certain Lee will win on 3 June and there’ll be a centrist government which will be a moderate improvement over Yoon’s right-wing populism. Koreans will breathe another sigh of relief but Lee’s policies look even less promising than his Democratic predecessor Moon Jae-in, who came to power on the back of protests in 2017. Rather than directly addressing issues of inequality, the paucity of the Korean welfare state or the problems of the ‘pressure cooker’ society, Lee is doubling down on Korea’s traditional developmentalism, promising investments in the defence industry and AI – essentially massive handouts to the huge chaebol conglomerates that will be sold as boosting jobs and growth. It seems a foregone conclusion that Lee’s government will disappoint swathes of the Korean population when living standards don’t improve. Without addressing the more fundamental issues in South Korean society that are driving parts of the population towards far-right ideas and activism, the country looks to be locked into a downward spiral of alternation between liberal centrism and right wing populism, while the potential for a new far-right street movement remains.

Owen Miller is a lecturer in Korean Studies at SOAS University of London.

This article is based on a talk for Talking about Socialism, which is available on video.