In Yoon’s martial law speech, a window into his troubling world view

SEOUL – When South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol shocked the world on the night of Dec 3 with

an unexpected declaration of martial law

– the first the country has seen since achieving full democracy in 1987 – his choice of words offered a revealing glimpse into his world view.

An analysis of key terms from his televised speech suggests a leader who increasingly views politics through an extremist lens and with a siege mentality, said experts.

“Legislative dictatorship”

“The Parliament has become a den of criminals intent on paralysing the executive and judicial branches through legislative dictatorship,” Mr Yoon said, as he laid bare his frustration with an opposition-controlled Parliament that has defined his presidency since he came to power in May 2022.

The backdrop to this grievance is unique in modern South Korean history: Mr Yoon’s administration is the first to govern with a minority of seats in the legislature throughout its entire term.

Struggling with approval ratings in the low 20s in recent months, he has largely been reduced to vetoing Bills passed by the liberal opposition, which secured landslide victories in two consecutive parliamentary elections in 2020 and 2024.

This political landscape has lately fuelled a narrative of “parliamentary tyranny” among conservative political circles.

Data from Big Kinds, the Korea Press Foundation’s media analytics platform, shows the number of political stories mentioning “legislative dictatorship” or “parliamentary dictatorship” across 87 local news outlets exploded from a mere 114 in 2019 to 1,509 in 2020 — the year the then ruling progressive Democratic Party clinched its majority in the National Assembly.

The term’s usage has remained high ever since, with 538 mentions in 2021, 955 in 2022, 491 in 2023, and an unprecedented 2,062 so far in 2024.

Political scientists, however, dismiss the term as politically manufactured.

“There is no such term in political science, not an academically established reference,” says Associate Professor Kim Nam-kyu, a comparative politics expert at Korea University. “While some of the Democratic Party’s political manoeuvring with its majority of seats may deserve criticism, labelling it dictatorship doesn’t align with reality.”

If anything, the pattern of democratic erosion observed across the world today runs counter to Mr Yoon’s claims, said experts. Rather than opposition parties wielding dictatorial power, democratic backsliding typically tends to begin when ruling parties gain legislative control and then systematically weaken checks on executive power.

“What we actually see in cases of democratic backsliding is the ruling party, not the opposition, securing a legislative majority to undermine institutional checks – a phenomenon scholars call ‘elective dictatorship’,” says Professor Joo Hyung-min, a political scientist and Russia/North Korea expert at Korea University. “The concept of so-called ‘legislative dictatorship’ by an opposition party is unheard of in political science.”

“Pro-North Korean, anti-state forces”

Perhaps the most alarming is Mr Yoon’s wholesale dismissal of his political opponents as enemies of the state collaborating with North Korea.

“I am declaring emergency martial law to protect the free Republic of Korea from the threats of North Korean communist forces, and to eradicate these shameless pro-North Korean, anti-state forces who plunder our people’s freedom and happiness,” he declared.

The term “anti-state” appeared five times in Mr Yoon’s speech, once to explicitly describe the main opposition party’s political manoeuvres and elsewhere to refer to an unspecified enemy he intends to “eradicate” — “cheokgyeol” in Korean, a severe term meaning total annihilation, typically reserved for hardline anti-communist rhetoric.

The implications of such language run deep within South Korea’s legal and political framework. The country’s 1948 National Security Act, born at the dawn of the Cold War, defines “anti-state organisations” primarily through the lens of the North Korean threat.

South Korea’s Supreme Court has explicitly defined North Korea as an anti-state organisation on at least three separate occasions.

The President’s use of “pro-North Korean” (jongbuk) also carries particularly loaded connotations. Unlike the milder term “chinbook”, which suggests mere sympathy for or a dovish stance toward North Korea, “jongbuk” implies servile allegiance to the North Korean state and has been frequently weaponised against progressives in South Korean political discourse.

“Extraordinary measures like martial law require extraordinary justifications,” said Prof Kim of Korea University. “In South Korea’s geopolitical context, those labelled ‘anti-state’ are almost exclusively linked to North Korea. But not many in real life perceive such an imminent crisis.”

For South Korea, a relatively young democracy that emerged from decades of authoritarian rule in the late 1980s, the rhetoric carries echoes of a not-too-distant past. Military strongmen Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan routinely labelled pro-democracy dissidents as communists to justify oppression.

“While some student activists in the 80s did indeed harbour radical pro-North Korean sentiments, these terms were primarily wielded by the dictatorship to crack down on pro-democracy protesters,” notes Prof Joo. “The question is whether anyone truly believes such forces pose a grave risk to the country today.”

Lost in translation

Beyond politically charged terminology, Mr Yoon’s speech was peppered with extreme metaphors and grandiose pronouncements that would seem out of place even in the most heated political debates.

The martial law declaration began with Mr Yoon claiming to address the nation “with a mind like vomiting blood” – an archaic expression indicating grave distress that struck many as outlandish for a modern political address.

His depiction of current affairs veered into apocalyptic imagery.

He warned twice of an imminent “national demise” (“mangguk”) and, reaching for classical Chinese imagery, compared the country’s situation to “a candle in the wind” (“pungjeondeunghwa”).

Such quaint flourishes, more suited to historical drama than everyday policy discourse, painted a picture of a perceived crisis that many South Koreans found totally disconnected from reality.

The President’s self-portrayal was equally outsized, where he appeared to cast himself in a saviour role. In a subsequent televised speech lifting martial law after Parliament’s vote to rescind it, he doubled down on his mission to “save the country” (“guguk”) — a term that has become a cliche among Park Chung-hee’s admirers when glorifying his 1961 military coup that ushered in 18 years of dictatorship.

“It’s like reading statements from North Korean state media,” one observer noted.

Signs of eroding democracy?

More fundamentally, in labelling his political opponents as anti-state forces, Mr Yoon has strayed far from presidential decorum and into territory that democracy scholars view with deep concern.

In their 2018 bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt warn that when political parties and the broader populace become deeply divided, they cease to view their opponents as legitimate rivals. Instead, they begin to perceive them as a dangerous threat to the nation, as enemies from within.

This dangerous shift, the authors note, can undermine democratic norms and institutions, potentially setting the stage for authoritarian rule.

Mr Yoon’s martial law declaration, with its stark characterisation of domestic opponents as existential threats to the state without offering credible evidence, bears notable similarities to this pattern.

While the attempted invocation of martial law itself represents a grave threat to democratic institutions and norms, his rhetoric seems to reveal something perhaps more troubling: a leader already deeply immersed in an authoritarian world view in which political opponents are enemies of the state requiring elimination.

“It’s a classic authoritarian playbook,” said Prof Kim. “Creating internal enemies supposedly conspiring with external ones offers the perfect pretext for curtailing civil liberties. For South Koreans who lived through the military dictatorship era, this rhetoric rings all too familiar.” THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK