South Korea’s conservatives rally, rebound in face of martial law, impeachment dramas

SEOUL, South Korea — The downfall of conservative South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, impeached and stripped of his powers after his shock martial law decree early last month, is suddenly looking less certain.

Two public opinion polls found that the popularity of Mr. Yoon and his People Power Party have rebounded. On Wednesday, the opposition-controlled National Assembly failed to pass bills that would have authorized investigations into Mr. Yoon’s abortive martial law decree and his wife’s suspected illegal activities.

It marks quite a turnaround for a figure many thought was politically finished. The National Assembly voted to impeach Mr. Yoon on Dec. 14 and his successor, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo, 13 days later.

On Friday, Mr. Yoon’s presidential security detail prevented police and special investigators from detaining him on insurrection charges, arguing that the detention was illegitimate. That failure humiliated the investigative body during questions in the National Assembly and caused an unseemly spat between the investigators and the police force.

Meanwhile, the National Assembly’s legal counsel has advised lawmakers to drop an insurrection charge against Mr. Yoon. The counsel said dropping the charge, disputed by the minority People Power Party, would accelerate the Constitutional Court’s impeachment proceedings.

In a country where street politics vies with executive and legislative clashes, even the streets are no longer dominated by forces demanding Yoon’s removal.

The president’s supporters, massed under a coalition of conservative and Christian groups, have mobilized and surrounded the presidential residence while flooding central Seoul’s Gwanghwamun district on weekends. They recorded the scenes with drones so nobody could dispute the size of their gatherings.

The political landscape is starkly different from just a few weeks ago.

In the second week of December, after the failed coup, Mr. Yoon’s approval ratings plunged to a low of 11%, but a Jan. 3-4 poll by the Korea Public Image Research Institute found his support had shot up to 40%.

The Hankyoreh, a left-wing newspaper, has criticized the institute’s poll for “leading questions” and “bias,” but a Jan. 6 poll by the widely cited Realmeter found that support for Mr. Yoon’s party was 34.4%, up from 30.6% one week earlier.

Realmeter also found that support for the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea stood at 45.2%, ahead of Mr. Yoon’s PPP but well down from the DPK’s 52.4% after the martial law fiasco.

The left has dominated the political debate since Mr. Yoon’s short-lived martial law decree, which many South Koreans said echoed the authoritarian governments that ruled until 1987.

Now, South Korea’s right wing is compelled to stand up and be counted, said Hwang Kyo-ahn, who led the country as acting president when the last conservative president, Park Geun-hye, was impeached and forced from office in 2017.

“We are in a big crisis right now. We are suppressed by the attacks of the left wing, by disunity among the right wing, and our president is impeached,” Mr. Hwang told foreign reporters on Wednesday. “It’s very tough and serious … but the right wing who were complacent in past years are now rising up.”

Questioning the system

If Mr. Yoon is forced out of office, DPK leader Lee Jae-myung is expected to win a subsequent presidential election and hand control of the legislature and the executive branch to the left. Reluctant conservatives now feel compelled to stand up and give voice to previous taboos, including questioning the integrity of the electoral system.

“When I talked about election fraud, I was treated as a liar. It was treated as a conspiracy,” said Yoon Kyung-byung, a chemistry professor at Seoul’s Sogang University. “I made so many enemies.”

After the president deployed commandos to seize data from the National Election Commission on the night of martial law, the issue reentered public discourse. Echoing President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters in the U.S., conservative protesters are waving banners emblazoned with the English signage, “Stop the Steal.”

Christian Protestants are stalwarts of South Korea’s conservative bloc. A major mobilizer is the Rev. Jun Kwang-hoon, chairman of the Gwanghwamun Patriots’ Rally.

“We made a USB and sent it to the president. We said half the opposition party lawmakers were voted through a fraudulent election,” Mr. Jun, a fire-and-brimstone preacher with a vast following, told foreign media on Monday. “The National Intelligence Service tried to hack the [National Election Commission] seven times, and they breached it six times. Therefore, President Yoon was sure our election system was rigged.”

Mr. Jun was a ferocious critic of Mr. Yoon’s predecessor, liberal president Moon Jae-in, who left office in 2022. In 2019, he told foreign reporters that Mr. Moon was “worse than Adolf Hitler.” He argued that Hitler was a German patriot while Mr. Moon worked for North Korea.

Mr. Yoon reversed Mr. Moon’s downgraded relations with Japan, but neither president ended Seoul’s alliance with Washington or broke sanctions on North Korea.

Having published and distributed a book titled “Trump and God” to Korean Americans, Mr. Jun revealed he would attend Mr. Trump’s inauguration in Washington.

Still, even staunch Yoon supporters acknowledge the uncertainty over the election fraud charges.

“We have a few bits of circumstantial evidence for election fraud, but no substantial evidence,” said Kim Chul-hong, who teaches at the Presbyterian University. “We hope that President Yoon has substantial evidence as he sent troops and got some information from the election commission computer servers.”

If data is revealed in upcoming Constitutional Court hearings, “there will be an upheaval to turn round the political geography of Korea,” Mr. Kim said.

Some of the impeached president’s supporters hope the election fraud and “fake news” controversies in South Korea elicit sympathy from the incoming Trump administration.

Elon Musk “is the right arm of Trump and is paying attention to our progress,” said Sogang University’s Mr. Yoon. The billionaire entrepreneur posted “wow” on X in response to a photo of South Korean conservative protesters waving U.S. flags.

Longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon “this morning had an interview with a Korean reporter about the real situation here,” the academic said. “He mentioned that legacy news media are not paying attention to the anti-impeachment or pro-Yoon activity. Legacy media is helping these pro-impeachment groups.”