South Korean President Demonstrates Poor Coup Technique

In general, conducting a proper coup requires one has some allies. Though all the details are still coming in, the conservative South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday offered a pretty quick lesson on this issue.

“Dear citizens, I declare emergency martial law to defend the free Republic of Korea from the threats of North Korean communist forces and to eradicate the shameless pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people and to protect the free constitutional order,” the president said in an unannounced address to the country on Tuesday night. The country had not experienced martial law since the military dictatorship was ousted in the 1980s.

This seems to have taken just about everyone by surprise. The leader of the opposition in the National Assembly quickly denounced the move as illegal and said the declaration meant that “Yoon is no longer the president.” Protestors quickly began amassing outside the Assembly building, which Yoon tried to block off from letting the representatives in to vote his martial law down (South Korean law allows for the legislature to overturn martial law, which, though it seems to have worked here, also seems to misunderstand what martial law is). The leader of Yoon’s own party said the move was “wrong” and should be rescinded.

Protests expanded. Reporters talked with random people who had woken up in the middle of the night to traipse across an enormous city to fight off the coup (autogolpe, technically). Though a general in the military issued a half-hearted dictat about how no democracy-type stuff was allowed and the media was now under state control, soldiers in the protests were apparently not too excited about mixing it up. Assembly members literally scaled walls to get in the building, and within a few hours 190 of the 300 members held a vote on a move to end martial law. All 190 voted for it.

It took a few more hours, but Yoon apparently saw the writing on the wall, and announced that he will lift martial law when he can convene his cabinet, as required. There are now, of course, loud calls for his impeachment and/or imprisonment, what with the coup attempt and all.

There is clearly more to learn about what, exactly, the president thought would happen here. He is a deeply unpopular president, with a tiny margin in the Assembly, in charge of a country with a reasonably recent memory of actual military dictatorship and a healthy culture of protest. Of course, unpopular people have managed to take over countries in the past; it just helps to have more than a few people on your side.