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People celebrate after President Yoon Suk-yeol's impeachment was accepted, near the Constitutional Court in Seoul, South Korea, on April 4, 2025.
South Korean president ousted, election looms
South Korea’s Constitutional Court on Friday voted unanimously to oust impeached President Yoon Suk-yeol over his decision to declare martial law in December. Supporters of Yoon who gathered near the presidential residence in Seoul reportedly cried out in disappointment as the court’s 8-0 decision was announced. Others cheered the ruling. The center-right leader is now the second South Korean president to be ousted.
South Korean authorities deployed a whopping 14,000 officers and 210 riot units throughout the capital to deal with expected mass protests and potential violence. Yoon did not attend the reading of the verdict, reportedly due to security concerns, but he accepted the decision. He expressed remorse for the way his time in office ended.
“I deeply regret not being able to live up to your hopes and expectations,” the former prosecutor said in a statement.
Yoon’s ouster caps a tumultuous period for South Korea. His martial law declaration marked the first time since 1980 that a South Korean leader had used such powers, and it triggered dark memories of the country’s military rule. Even though the declaration lasted just six hours, the National Assembly impeached Yoon in a bipartisan vote on the grounds that he violated his constitutional duty.
Friday’s ruling starts the clock for a presidential election within 60 days, during which time Han Duck-soo,prime minister and acting president, will remain at the helm.
Yoon faces more legal woes. The former president now faces criminal charges for alleged treason, marking the latest battle between the judicial branch and a political leader — and echoing similar clashes in Brazil, France, Israel, Romania, and the United States. Even if the Constitutional Court had ruled in Yoon’s favor, he still would have faced these charges, but the decision against him makes the case much more likely to proceed.Protesters demanded the ouster of South Korean President Yoon in central Seoul on March 29, 2025.
South Korean leader to learn his political fate on Friday
Controversy on the peninsula. The impeachment case revolves around whether Yoon unconstitutionally declared martial law on Dec. 3, a move that lasted all of six hours. The National Assembly, which is dominated by the center-left Democratic Party, impeached the center-right president 11 days after the incident on the grounds that he violated his constitutional duty (and did so with the support of a handful of lawmakers from Yoon’s own party). While many demonstrated against Yoon’s declaration of martial law, his conservative backers – a small but vocal minority – have taken to the streets in recent months to show their support for the president.
Don’t bet against Yoon’s removal from office. Six of the court’s eight justices need to vote for Yoon’s removal if he is to be removed from office, an outcome that Eurasia Group regional expert Jeremy Chan believes is more likely than not.
“Public support for Yoon’s removal remains high, and the legal merits of the case against Yoon are solid. Excusing his martial law declaration would also risk normalizing it for future leaders,” he said.
Should the court rule in Yoon’s favor, he would return to office immediately, but if the court rules against him, as expected, South Korea must hold presidential elections within 60 days. Regardless of the ruling, Yoon still faces criminal charges for alleged treason – the one charge for which a sitting president is not immune. While the legal system may stem the criminal proceedings if he retains his presidential immunity, it is far more likely to proceed if he is removed from office.
Schools will be closed Friday, and police will be out in force in anticipation of mass protests, which are likely no matter how the court rules, says Chan.
Sea change for Seoul? If Yoon’s impeachment is formalized, acting President and Prime Minister Han Duck-soo will remain at the helm until an election takes place this spring. Opposition leader Lee Jae-myung, of the center-left, is the firm favorite to win at the polls. With a more dovish foreign policy stance, South Korea under Lee would likely seek warmer ties with China and North Korea, says Chan.
“Lee is a progressive populist who has been skeptical of the pro-US and pro-Japan tilt that South Korea’s foreign policy took under Yoon,” he said.
FILE PHOTO: Supporters of impeached South Korea's President Yoon Suk Yeol participate in a rally outside the Seoul Detention Center in Uiwang, South Korea, January 18, 2025.
Yoon dodges questioning after supporters storm court
Impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeolrefused to accompany police officers for questioning on Monday, after his supporters stormed a court that approved his continued detention on Sunday. Ninety people were detained during the clash, and other people who participated are being identified for prosecution.
The authorities might not have to search that hard. The rioters livestreamed themselves blasting lines of police with foam from fire extinguishers and entering the courthouse by force. They broke into at least one judge’s chamber during the brief incursion.
Yoon said through his lawyers that he found the rampage “shocking and unfortunate” but that he understood the “rage and unfairness” many Koreans felt. His lawyers have argued that his arrest last Wednesday was illegal and that the court has no jurisdiction in this matter.
Politics are in the most precarious place in years. While impeached, Yoon has still not been formally removed from office, and the long delay has allowed his political allies to consolidate. Elections will be held 60 days after Yoon is formally removed by the Constitutional Court.
In the meantime, markets are suffering through the uncertainty, and the central bank downgraded economic growth forecasts for the coming year to between 1.6% and 1.7%.South Korean President Yoon arrested
Impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol was arrested by officers from the national corruption authority after an hours-long standoff on Wednesday morning. His detainment comes six weeks after his short-lived imposition of martial law, for which he was impeached and suspended from office, but his final removal is pending a ruling from the Constitutional Court.
Yoon, the first South Korean president to be arrested while technically still in office, was taken via motorcade to a detention center in the suburbs of Seoul. In a statement posted to social media, Yoon said he chose to submit to arrest to avoid violence, but he reportedly refused to answer questions during police interrogation. Police now have less than 48 hours to formally charge him before they must obtain a warrant to continue holding him.
Eurasia Group’s Jeremy Chan says Yoon can’t keep dragging his feet. “Now that he has been removed from his official residence, Yoon will likely be unable to avoid answering the questions of CIO investigators, the Constitutional Court, and parliamentary hearings.”
The arrest blows South Korea further into uncharted waters. When former President Park Geun-hye was impeached in 2017, prosecutors waited for her removal before bringing charges and arrest warrants. South Korean presidents may be arrested for insurrection, which is what Yoon is facing, but otherwise enjoy immunity from prosecution.
Part of the rush has to do with opposition leader Lee Jae-myung’s own legal problems. If the Supreme Court rules against him in corruption cases related to his earlier political positions, he could be barred from standing for president — but if he can force Yoon out and hold elections in time, it renders the issue moot.
Still, Lee is looking like much less of a sure bet than he was in mid-December. His party’s support among voters has fallen from 52% in the beginning of December to 42% in January, barely ahead of Yoon’s party at 40%.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken holds a joint press conference with South Korean Foreign Minister Cho Tae Yul following their talks in Seoul on Jan. 6, 2025.
South Korean authorities get extension to Yoon arrest warrant
South Korean anti-corruption authorities reached a deal with police to extend their warrant against impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol on Monday after failing to arrest him on Friday. A six-hour standoff with presidential security in the official residence amounted to nothing, and the corruption investigators have asked the National Police Agency to take over the responsibility of detaining Yoon. Authorities have not disclosed the new extension's expiration date.
Police are in uncharted waters, however, as no previous South Korean president has been arrested before being removed from office. Yoon was impeached in December, but vacancies on the constitutional court have prevented his official removal. Meanwhile, his party is playing for time – hoping to stall long enough to allow the high court to rule on a case that could render the opposition leader ineligible to run in elections to replace Yoon.
The gridlock is starting to chafe allies, and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he had expressed “serious concerns” during talks in Seoul with his counterpart on Monday. But Blinken also praised the strong response of South Korean institutions to Yoon’s attempt to seize power through martial law.
North Korea, which has taken a cautious approach thus far amid Seoul’s domestic upheaval, used Blinken’s visit as an opportunity to test a medium-range missile with a supposedly hypersonic capacity. We’re watching how Pyongyang approaches potential provocations once the Biden administration leaves the scene.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol delivers an address to the nation at the Presidential Office in Seoul, South Korea, December 12, 2024.
South Korean president’s removal slows down over court vacancies
On Tuesday, the floor leader for South Korea’s newly-impeached President Yoon Suk-yeol’s party said it would be inappropriate to fill vacancies on the constitutional court with the powers of an acting president, setting up a fight aimed at slow-rolling Yoon’s final removal from office.
Wait, how is Yoon impeached but not gone? It’s a two-step process. The National Assembly was able to clear the two-thirds supermajority to impeach Yoon on Saturday, and he was immediately suspended from office. Now at least six justices on the constitutional court need to approve the legality of the impeachment — and this isn’t a given. The court overturned the much more controversial impeachment of former President Roh Moo-hyun in 2004. Once that hurdle is cleared, Yoon is gone for good, and a sixty day clock starts ticking down to fresh elections.
There’s just one problem. Three of the court’s nine seats are vacant, meaning the entire bench would need to vote unanimously to remove Yoon. Even though the facts are pretty stacked against Yoon, just one justice could theoretically put him back in office, which is why the liberal opposition wants to fill the three seats.
Ideally, as quickly as possible, because their leader, and presumptive presidential candidate, Lee Jae-myung is in legal hot water of his own. He was convicted of violating election laws and handed a one-year suspended sentence in November, which could prevent him from running for president — if the Supreme Court upholds the ruling.
Eurasia Group’s Jeremy Chan says the opposition “recognizes that the longer this drags out, the greater the chances that the Supreme Court will have time to rule on Lee’s conviction,” and possibly keep him out of the race. We’re watching how acting president Han Duck-soo handles the vacancies, as well as how the criminal case against Yoon and his collaborators proceeds.
What's next for South Korea after President Yoon's impeachment?
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: A Quick Take to kick off your week. The South Korean President, Yoon Suk Yeol has been impeached. Second time the charm, the first time his own party didn't go ahead with it because they wanted to give him the opportunity to resign, himself. He chose not to, shredding what little was remaining of his own personal and political legacy, and now he's out. The party itself basically freed the members of the party to vote their conscience, and many of them did, and that's it. He's now a former president. There's a caretaker government coming in with the prime minister in charge. South Korea's in disarray. They don't have a president. They don't have a minister of interior. They don't have a minister of defense. They don't have a minister of justice. Everything's not occupied and going to have to be, "acting," for a matter of months.
First, you've got to get the constitutional court to rule on this, and that will happen. But there are three absentees that need to be appointed there. Hopefully that all gets done within a matter of weeks, a couple of months, and then after that, when it's upheld the impeachment, then you'll have new elections in a couple of months.
So, I mean, first the bad news. The bad news is that this was a disgrace. It was an active subversion of the South Korean constitution or attempt thereof, and their checks and balances on their president and his approval ratings as he's forced out in the single digits, we're talking Peru president levels almost, at this point. It comes at a bad time. The Japanese have a weak government in coalition, and the United States has a new president coming in with much stronger consolidated power. So if you're South Korea and you need to formulate a response to dealing with America First demands, to spend more money on American troops on the ground, demands to do more, to redress what's seen as a trade imbalance by the incoming President-elect. All of that is really hard to do when you don't have an effective government. That's the bad news.
The good news is that the system worked the way it was supposed to, and both the military, and the judiciary, and the constitutional court, and the parliament, everyone is acting to contain behavior that is off the rails by a sitting executive. And that shows that South Korean democracy is very much functional and representative of its people, much like nearly all of the advanced industrial democracies. The US is the country that is the outlier here. South Korea, not so surprising.
Another piece of bad news is that it's almost certain that the winner, the incoming winner of the next presidential election will be the Democratic Party of Korea, which got the majority in parliament in the last parliamentary elections. And their leader, Lee Jae-myung is frankly not much more popular than outgoing Yoon. It's going to be, he's had his own scandals, electoral scandals that could potentially bring him down depending on how the court, the Supreme Court rules, assuming that that doesn't happen. If it did, it would cause massive instability and lots of people out on the streets demonstrating and the rest. But if that didn't happen, then he's going to be the leader of South Korea and he'll be again, a very weak leader. It'll also be a very weak leader leading the country in a very different direction. This is a party that will actively support the Sunshine policy with North Korea, very different than outgoing former President Yoon. Would support closer ties with their leading trade partner, China. Would question the rapprochement with Japan and would also question a stronger relationship with their defense partner and ally, the United States. So a lot of uncertainty going forward with South Korea.
One other really interesting thing about this whole saga is the role that AI played. Yoon, a deeply unpopular kind of anti-social figure. Very brusque, not an obvious retail politician, but on the campaign trail, developed an AI essentially deep fake Yoon that was training on a lot of his speeches, but better looking and more engaging and more social, and was used extensively on the campaign trail, both to talk about his policies, to engage with individual voters, to hurl insults at the opposition, and even to engage socially. And this was, I mean, AI Yoon was a lot more popular than actual Yoon, and a big piece of why it was that he ended up being elected president. Unfortunately, AI Yoon was not the president that the South Koreans got. They got actual Yoon who turned out to be possibly even less capable than AI Yoon, and we are all very happy to see the back of him.
So that's pretty much the end of this crazy little few-week saga in South Korean politics. We now bring you back to our regularly scheduled program.
FILE PHOTO: South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol speaks on the government budget at the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea, 25 October 2022.
K-Drama continues as Yoon defies summons
South Korea’s rogue President Yoon Suk Yeol was impeached on Saturday and is now facing charges of insurrection – but will he show up for trial?
Yoon failed to appear in court Sunday after receiving a summons from prosecutors investigating him and senior officials for abuse of authority and obstructing rights. Then, when investigators attempted to serve him a request for questioning regarding the insurrection charges on Monday, his office refused to accept it.
The charges stem from Yoon’s shock invocation of martial law December 3 - a decree that was overturned a mere six hours later. Yoon’s powers have since been suspended until the constitutional court confirms the legality of his impeachment.
What happens next? The court began deliberations on Monday, with a ruling expected within 180 days, but a decision could come sooner based on the impeachments of previous South Korean leaders. If Yoon is dismissed, a national election must be held within 60 days. Opposition leader Lee Jae-myung, seen as the frontrunner to replace Yoon, proposed a special council for policy cooperation between the government and parliament and called for a quick resolution “to minimize national confusion and the suffering of the people.”
Based on this Saturday’s giant dance party in Seoul following the impeachment, however, it doesn’t seem that South Koreans are that upset. Thousands braved the bitter cold and took to the streets to celebrate, after a vote the previous weekend failed to garner enough support.