South Korea’s Democracy: Both Resilient and Fragile

After months of political turmoil, South Korea held a snap presidential election on 3 June 2025. The election became necessary when the then president, Yoon Suk-yeol, was impeached after declaring martial law and attempting a self-coup on 3 December 2024 – a move that was thwarted within hours. South Korea’s parliament, the National Assembly, passed a bill to impeach Yoon on 14 December, and the Constitutional Court unanimously upheld the decision.

These coordinated legislative and judicial responses served as robust institutional checks on authoritarian overreach, affirming the principle of horizontal accountability. The subsequent election of Lee Jae-myung of the opposition Democratic Party of Korea was an example of vertical accountability that reflected the electorate’s capacity to throw out the incumbent and signalled a moment of democratic recovery.

Yet, this narrative of democratic resilience is tempered by the troubling fact that South Korea is the only advanced democracy to have removed two presidents from office by impeachment in the past quarter-century. In addition to Yoon, Park Geun-hye of the conservative Saenuri Party was impeached and removed from office in 2017. Earlier, President Roh Moo-hyun faced impeachment in 2004, and Acting President Han Duck-soo was impeached in 2024.

By comparison, in other affluent democracies, impeachment has occurred only once in Chile, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania, and twice in the United States – but none of these cases resulted in the president’s removal. When middle-income countries are included, Peru is the only comparable case, having removed three presidents after six impeachment proceedings. South Korea’s unusually frequent recourse to impeachment thus indicates a notable degree of democratic fragility in a high-income context.

Mutual tolerance and institutional restraint

To understand the state of South Korea’s democracy, it is essential to grasp how it has moved from a phase marked by elements of fragility, through a period of political uncertainty, to a stage in which resilience has re-emerged. A useful starting point is the institutional tension between the separation of powers in South Korea’s constitution, which requires compromise among political actors, and the country’s personalist parties, which treat compromise as an act of political treachery, especially in a polarised environment.

This tension intensifies when the incumbent president faces a divided government, where an opposition party or coalition controls the legislature. Notably, all four presidential impeachments occurred at such a time. That said, not every divided government leads to an impeachment, as illustrated by the presidencies of Roh Tae-woo (1988–1993) and Kim Dae-jung (1998–2003), both of whom faced divided governments without being impeached.

What makes a divided government particularly perilous for an incumbent president is mounting partisan polarisation, as party elites find themselves claiming more credit for taking uncompromising positions. In such a rancorous setting, the constitution alone cannot guarantee the smooth functioning of democracy. To navigate the difficulties posed by a divided government, informal norms that arise from the constitution serve to regulate political behaviour. Two such norms are mutual tolerance and institutional restraint.

Mutual tolerance refers to the principle that as long as political rivals respect the constitution, they are recognised as legitimate participants in governance and entitled to compete for and exercise power. Institutional restraint, meanwhile, is the practice of refraining from exercising one’s legal rights to the fullest extent – acknowledging that even if certain powers are legal, their unchecked use could destabilise the democratic order. While the importance of these norms may be obscured in times of democratic stability, their violation becomes starkly visible in crises. When tolerance and restraint cease to function as guiding tenets of political behaviour, democracy is in peril.

The South Korean constitution contains clauses that generate expectations of institutional restraint. These include the National Assembly’s power to impeach senior officials in the executive and the judiciary and the president’s power to ask to reconsider legislation passed by the assembly. Under these provisions, senior officials must refrain from abuses of power to avoid impeachment, and the legislature must exercise caution in passing radical laws to avoid a presidential veto.

If impeachment or veto powers are used frequently, this indicates that the notion of institutional restraint has broken down, undermining democratic governance. A party that violates this norm can be said to have engaged in constitutional hardball – using legal tools to pursue partisan gain while breaking democratic norms.

Likewise, the South Korean constitution presumes that political actors are tolerant towards one another. Delaying regular elections for the assembly or the presidency, refusing to accept election results, invoking martial law without just cause, interfering with the assembly’s authority to lift martial law, and rejecting impeachment rulings of the Constitutional Court all violate this norm. If a party engages in intolerant political actions, it can be said to be weaponising constitutional tools to undermine the democratic order.

From the numbers of impeachment motions and presidential requests for legislative reconsideration between 1988 and 2024, it is clear that the two constitutional norms have ceased to safeguard democracy in South Korea. In the 33 years before Yoon’s inauguration, the assembly submitted 20 impeachment motions against senior officials; in the two and a half years after he took office in 2022, the number rose sharply to 29, a nearly 20-fold increase. Similarly, the number of times the president asked to reconsider bills totalled 16 before Yoon’s presidency but jumped to 33 during his term.

These sharp rises show that both the opposition and the president have ignored the norm of institutional restraint by excessively exercising their respective powers. By the time Yoon invoked martial law, this core principle had already been substantially undermined.

Consequently, Yoon’s decision to declare martial law can be seen as a reaction to the escalating spiral between the opposition’s impeachment motions and the president’s legislative vetoes. This was a prolonged standoff in which both sides played constitutional hardball. Invoking martial law was an extreme measure by the president, aimed at breaking the deadlock. Paradoxically, Yoon chose to suspend the very order he claimed to defend in an effort to restore democracy.

Elite polarisation versus voter consistency

In South Korea’s conservative narrative, those who advocate reconciliation with North Korea are often cast as traitors and implicitly excluded from the national community. Conversely, a progressive narrative portrays those who seek rapprochement with Japan as collaborators, similarly denying their legitimacy as members of the nation.

When political elites adopt discourses that frame the other side’s supporters as existential threats to the nation, democratic competition devolves into pernicious nationalist polarisation. In this context, when progressive parties hold power, conservatives perceive their national identity as being stripped away; when conservatives govern, progressives likewise feel invalidated. Under such conditions, elections are no longer public contests over policy but symbolic battlegrounds of political life and death.

As a result, when democratic norms conflict with partisan advantage, party elites and their supporters increasingly adopt the principle of “party first, democracy later”. This is a troubling indicator of democratic regression in South Korea.

Yoon’s decision in 2024 to declare martial law emerged as a product of South Korea’s long-standing nationalist polarisation. His strategy reflected an intensification of constitutional hardball tactics in both camps, based on half a century of deepening nationalist division.

One of the most important caveats is the fact that nationalist polarisation in South Korea is mostly a top-down political development. In other words, polarisation is mainly an elite-level phenomenon, while voters have not shifted their electoral preferences.

The electorate’s bipartisan support for impeachment was evident in the trials of Park and Yoon. During Park’s impeachment, public support for the process stood at between 77% and 81%. Likewise, backing for Yoon’s impeachment ranged from 58% to 75%. Even though the overall level of support for Yoon’s impeachment was lower than for Park’s, most voters agreed that presidents who breach the constitution should be punished.

This disconnect between polarised elites and more moderate voters offers an insight into the dual nature of South Korean democracy. On the one hand, the elites’ failure to represent their constituents and offer coherent policy platforms erodes democratic responsiveness, creating space for autocratic alternatives. On the other hand, the parties’ weakness in fully capturing voters’ allegiance enables a resilient swing electorate that resists authoritarian overreach.

In sum, South Korea’s political parties are strong enough to institutionalise elite polarisation but too weak to encapsulate the electorate. This paradoxical configuration has produced a democracy that is simultaneously fragile and resilient: fragile because of elite dysfunction, but resilient because of a non-partisan citizenry that consistently rejects autocratic ambitions.

 

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This publication was produced with the financial support of the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

 

Photo credit: © 대한민국 국회 (National Assembly of the Republic of Korea), Wikimedia Commons