By Jack Kim
SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol faces the greatest threat to his brief but chequered political career as he struggles to thwart an unprecedented arrest attempt in a criminal probe alleging he led an insurrection.
A tough political survivor who has become increasingly isolated halfway through his five-year term, Yoon, 64, has been dogged by personal scandals, an unyielding opposition and rifts within his own party.
Since narrowly winning election in 2022, Yoon has become embittered by continual battles that have drawn out a recklessness that a former rival said is his defining trait.
By the time Yoon briefly imposed martial law on Dec. 3, he was badly bruised politically. He was suspended from his duties after being impeached by parliament on Dec. 14 for his martial law attempt. His political fate is in the hands of the Constitutional Court as his legal peril mounts, with prosecutors trying unsuccessfully to arrest him on Friday.
Blockaded inside his official residence this week, he issued a message to supporters that he would “fight until the end”, rallying hard-core supporters to join him in a fight to save the country from “anti-state forces”.
The one-page letter, signed “President Yoon Suk Yeol”, and earlier messages of defiance asserting he was acting out of “burning patriotism” to save democracy, drew alarm that he might have become unhinged. Some feared his judgment was so damaged that he had become a danger to South Korea, a global industrial powerhouse and one of the most powerful success stories of democratic resilience.
An opposition Democratic Party member said Yoon has proven that he is “delusional”. Even those more sympathetic said he had buckled under extreme pressure from endless political attacks, some of which he probably took personally.
“I hope we remember how the opposition party has incredibly and viciously pushed the president and his family into the corner with threats of special prosecutors and impeachment,” said Ihn Yohan, a member of parliament for Yoon’s People Power Party.
SCANDALS, THREATS OF PROSECUTION, ‘AMERICAN PIE’
The past year of Yoon’s presidency has been overshadowed by a scandal involving his wife, who was accused of inappropriately accepting a pricey Christian Dior (EPA:) handbag as a gift, and his refusal to fully own up to it.
Yoon apologised after the scandal was blamed as a major reason for a crushing parliamentary election defeat the PPP suffered in April. But he continued to reject calls for a probe into the scandal and into an allegation of stock price manipulation involving his wife and her mother.
The prosecutors office that investigated the allegations decided not to press charges against the first lady.
Yoon’s struggles at home have overshadowed the relative success he has had on the international stage.
His bold push to reverse a decades-long diplomatic row with neighbouring Japan and join Tokyo in a three-way security cooperation with the United States are widely seen as his signature foreign policy legacies.
Yoon’s ability to bond on a personal level, seen as the trait that gave him his early success, was on full display at a White House event in 2023, when Yoon took the stage and belted out the 1970s pop hit “American Pie” for an astounded President Joe Biden and a delighted crowd.
SHAMANS, HIGH SCHOOL BUDDIES
Born into an affluent family in Seoul, Yoon was an easygoing youth who excelled at school. He entered the elite Seoul National University to study law, but his penchant for partying led him to repeatedly fail the bar exam before passing on the ninth try.
Yoon shot to national fame in 2016 when, as the chief investigator probing then-President Park Geun-hye for corruption, he was asked if he was out for revenge and responded that prosecutors are not gangsters.
Three years earlier, Park suspended Yoon, then fired him from a team investigating a high-profile case against the nation’s spy agency. That move was widely considered punishment for challenging her authority.
The role he played in jailing the sitting president and his dramatic comeback as head of the powerful Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office marked the start of a dizzying rise to power.
Two years later, he became South Korea’s prosecutor general, spearheading a corruption probe of a close ally to the next president, Moon Jae-in. That made him a darling of conservatives frustrated with Moon’s liberal policies, setting Yoon up to be a candidate for the presidency in 2022.
But his presidency got off to a rocky start when he pushed ahead with moving the presidential office out of the Blue House compound to a new site, sparking questions whether it was because of a feng shui belief that the old presidential compound was cursed. Yoon denied any involvement by himself or his wife with a shaman.
When Yoon refused to fire top officials after a 2022 Halloween crowd crush killed 159 people, he was accused of protecting his “yes men”. One was Safety Minister Lee Sang-min, a fellow graduate of Yoon’s high school.
Another alumnus of the Choongam High School in Seoul was Kim Yong-hyun, the man who spearheaded the presidential office move, became the presidential security service chief and then was appointed defence minister in September.
Kim was one of the two people who recommended that Yoon declare martial law, a senior military official said. Lee was the other.
