The unanimous upholding of the President’s impeachment sets a milestone for the young democracy. What’s next?
On Friday morning in South Korea, the eight judges of the country’s Constitutional Court appeared live on national television, sitting solemn-faced in their high-back, red-velvet chairs. Three months earlier, the country’s conservative President, Park Geun-hye, had been impeached by the National Assembly. The court had been tasked with either upholding or overturning the legislators’ decision, and it was now ready to issue its ruling. Lee Jung-mi, the only woman justice, read the entire opinion aloud. The court condemned Park’s “betrayal of the public trust” and emphasized the need to “protect the constitution.” Lee spoke for more than twenty minutes, and then a digital scorecard eclipsed her on the screen: eight votes to uphold the impeachment, zero to overturn.
Outside the courthouse, in Seoul, anti-Park democracy activists greeted the ruling by dancing and marching in spontaneous parades, replete with party hats, balloons, and sparklers. Pro-Park demonstrators gathered as well, in angry crowds, and three people died in the chaos. The ruling had been expected, but Korea is a young democracy, and Koreans have rarely seen such dramatic change occur through the courts, much less through citizen protest. In this case, though, the scale of the President’s misdeeds and the volume of the accompanying outcry—tens of millions of “Candlelight Movement” demonstrators filling city streets—had been impossible to ignore.
The scandal, and Park’s subsequent impeachment, triggered a debate over the nation’s economic, political, and social order. On one side were Park’s supporters—mostly older Koreans, fearful of North Korea, still traumatized by war, and holding fond memories of Park’s father, Park Chung-hee, the “modernizing” military dictator who ran the country in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. On the other were citizens fatigued by the past decade of hard-right rule. The so-called Candlelight Movement came to stand for a broad set of principles: freedom of speech, government and corporate accountability, economic redistribution, and workers’ rights.
