Via ROK Drop reader Korean Man comes this interesting article from Modern Diplomacy assessing that the impeachment of President Yoon next year is a possibility:
It is problematic to poke any other faults since Yoon has been running the country for a little over six months and has not had time to make any consequential decisions that could supply political ammunition against him. Blaming Yoon for the economic storm is risky as this could lead to questions about who had sowed the wind in the first place.
Technically, however, there is little to stop the Democrats from initiating the impeachment proceedings that could be announced if voted for by 200 out of 300 Members of Parliament and subsequently endorsed by the Constitutional Court. The Democrats already have 169 votes that could be beefed up to 200 by enlisting allies from other left-wing parties and Yoon’s enemies among the Conservatives like Lee Jun-seok’s faction. They have enough of their appointees in the Constitutional Court, and, as the Candlelight Vigil showed, public protests can be as effective as backdoor influence in terms of putting pressure on a public institution.
Lurking as yet another potential factor in the fray are the United States that may choose to assist in toppling President Yoon to replace him with a classic right-winger, given that the Democrats are as pro-American as the Conservatives anyway. If the United States are gearing up for a global confrontation, Washington would be better off with an amenable rather than pragmatic head of South Korean state.
You can read much more at the link, but it is very clear that the Democrat Party is trying to use the Itaewon crushing tragedy to attack the President with like they did the Sewol tragedy with former impeached President Park. However, they are not getting as much traction on Yoon as they hoped because his poll numbers continue to slowly rise after the tragedy. Also I am not sensing any unhappiness with President Yoon from the United States either so I don’t see any pressure on Yoon coming from that direction. As it is right now I don’t think impeachment will happen, but it is clearly the strategy I have been saying for weeks that the Democratic Party is trying to execute against President Yoon since the Itaewon crushing incident happened.
Yoon’s approval rating is still not great, but at least it is trending in the right direction and no longer in the 30’s:
President Yoon Suk Yeol’s approval rating inched up 0.1 percentage point to 41.2 percent, climbing for the second consecutive week, a poll showed Monday.
In the survey of 2,518 adults conducted from Monday to Friday last week, 41.2 percent gave a positive assessment of Yoon’s performance, while 56.6 percent gave a negative assessment, according to pollster Realmeter.
You can read more at the link, but the Korean left is going to need President Yoon’s approval rating to be much lower if they hope to try and impeach him using the Itaewon Crushing Tragedy as a pretext.
High-profile politicians from the ruling party and the presidential office are under heavy fire after speaking ill of the bereaved families who lost their loved ones in the Oct. 29 crowd disaster in Itaewon, accusing them of venting their anger at the government. Lawmakers and observers chastised the ruling party politicians for their lack of sympathy and political attacks on the family members who started a civic group to call for a full government investigation and an apology from the president.
The most-criticized remark came from Kim Seong-hoi, former presidential secretary for religious and multicultural affairs in the Yoon Suk-yeol administration. He criticized the bereaved families for demanding the government take responsibility for poorly managing the crowd on Halloween weekend and for failing to communicate properly with the victims’ families.
“Why do you people blame the government for the whole thing when it was your responsibility to keep your grown-up children from going (there)?” Kim wrote on Facebook, Sunday. “Have your children been conscripted by the state from birth? Since when did the president of the free Republic of Korea become the ‘supreme paternal leader’ (who must take care of all members of the public)?”
You can read more at the link with other ruling party politicians making comments critical of the victim’s families. I can understand their frustration with political activists trying to nationalize what was a tragedy caused by whoever started pushing people in the crowd and the lack of crowd control by the local police. With that said the ruling party needs to keep their comments to themselves because it just further gives fodder to politicize this tragedy by their critics.
It looks like the ruling party is intending to continue the trend of putting ex-ROK Presidents in jail:
Following former national security adviser Suh Hoon’s arrest on Saturday for allegedly covering up North Korea’s killing of a South Korean official in the West Sea, clashes between ruling and opposition parties are intensifying, with eyes on whether the investigation will target former President Moon Jae-in.
The prosecution issued an arrest warrant Saturday at around 4:55 a.m. against former national security adviser and spy agency chief Suh after more than 10 hours of questioning, citing the “risk of Suh destroying evidence.” Suh was the first presidential aide of Moon to be arrested among those accused of mishandling of the death of South Korean Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries official Lee Dae-jun in September 2020.
The ruling party and an attorney representing the deceased official’s brother Lee Rae-jin are ramping up calls for justice over the former Moon administration’s labeling of Lee Dae-jun as a South Korean defector to North Korea. This had effectively relieved Seoul of its duty to protect Lee and acquitted Pyeongyang of its summary execution. Meanwhile, evidence that Lee was a defector remains under question.
The ruling People Power Party interim chief Chung Jin-suk said in a statement Saturday on social media that Moon’s statement last Thursday indicated that Moon should be held accountable for the border killing case.
You can read more at the link, but if the ruling party moves forward with trying to jail former President Moon it will pretty much be a guarantee that current President Yoon will be tried for something once the Korean left regains power.
With that all said it would be interesting to find out who in the Moon administration pushed to label the fishery official as a defector in order to not impact their North Korean appeasement strategy.
This here is a perfect example of a lawmaker passing on fake news to attack the President’s wife with for political gain:
The presidential office filed a complaint with the police against main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) Rep. Jang Kyung-tae for “spreading false information” about photos taken earlier this month during first lady Kim Keon-hee’s visit with a Cambodian child suffering a congenital heart disease. The presidential office complained that Jang had described the first lady’s photo shoot as a “concept shoot using at least two or three lights and other on-site studio-level equipment.”
Rep. Jang had stirred up debate over his remarks that Kim’s photo shoot amounted to “poverty porn,” or the exploitation of people in impoverished conditions to garner sympathy or support for a cause, and that it was a diplomatic discourtesy as she met the child instead of attending an official program organized at the same time for spouses of visiting world leaders. He is now under investigation by the National Assembly’s ethics committee.
The presidential office said it filed a complaint against Jang with the police for his remarks during a Nov. 18 DPK Supreme Council member meeting and subsequent Facebook posting. (……)
During the meeting, Jang supported his claims, saying that “foreign media and photography experts analyze the photo of Kim Keon-hee as having been taken with at least two to three lights to create an on-site studio, as a concept photo shoot, rather than being a photograph taken of the natural volunteering process.” It later turned out he was citing a posting on the U.S.-based global web forum Reddit, which had since been deleted.
The fact that the pro-North Korea Minbun group is involved shows how these lawyers plan to use the Itaewon crush tragedy to politically attack the Yoon administration:
The bereaved families of some Itaewon crowd crush victims held a news conference Tuesday, calling for the punishment of those responsible for the tragic accident.
The conference was organized in southern Seoul by Minbyun-Lawyers for a Democratic Society, an organization of progressive lawyers, which it says legally represents the families of 34 of 158 people killed during and after Halloween celebrations in Seoul’s Itaewon district on Oct. 29.
This is the first time I have read of a direct accusation against Lee Jae-myung from someone directly involved with the Daejang-dong real estate investment scandal:
Lawyer Nam Wook, a key figure in the Daejang-dong development corruption scandal, is surrounded by reporters as he walks to his trial at the Seoul Central District Court in Seocho District, southern Seoul on Monday. [YONHAP]
A key figure in the Daejang-dong corruption scandal said Monday he heard that Democratic Party (DP) leader Lee Jae-myung held a hidden stake through one of the investors in the project.
Lawyer Nam Wook made the allegation at his trial on the Daejang-dong case at the Seoul Central District Court, hours after he was released from jail at midnight Sunday after his detention period expired. Nam is charged with breach of trust and bribery in the case.
His case is believed by prosecutors to be part of a larger conspiracy concerningastronomical profits raked in by Hwacheon Daeyu, a previously obscure asset management company, and its Cheonhwa Dongin affiliates, from minuscule investments in a 2015 real estate development project in the Daejang-dong area of Seongnam, Gyeonggi, as well as suspicions about their true ownership.
The bodies were not even cold yet from the Itaewon Crushing Disaster before the political opposition decided to use them to demand the President and other government officials resign:
Rep. Lee Jae-myung, leader of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea, adjusts his glasses during a meeting at the National Assembly in Seoul, Monday. Yonhap
Only a few hours after the news broke last month about a deadly crowd crush in central Seoul’s Itaewon, Nam Young-hee, vice chief of the Institute for Democracy, a think tank of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), concluded that President Yoon Suk-yeol and his safety minister were to blame and demanded they step down immediately.
The comment, which she made when police and emergency workers were still scrambling to gather the facts, was a grim sign of how the tragic incident, which killed 156 people and injured 197 others, could be used ― and exploited ― politically.
Two days after the end of a national mourning period for the victims and their families, Rep. Lee Jae-myung, leader of the DPK, called for the resignations of all relevant top officials, including Prime Minister Han Duck-soo.
“The president, who is responsible for this disaster and all state affairs, should apologize sincerely to the people and the victims,” Lee said during a meeting at the National Assembly in Seoul, Monday. “Taking responsibility comes with action rather than words … There should be a sweeping reshuffle, including the resignation of the prime minister.”
Lee also called for a new investigation into the case under an independent counsel, saying that police and prosecutors under Yoon cannot be trusted.
With all the investigations going on involving the political opposition, the Justice Minister is unsurprisingly being closely watched by the opposition in effort to politically neutralize him:
Justice Minister Han Dong-hoon said Tuesday he will take legal action against Rep. Kim Eui-kyeom of the main opposition Democratic Party and a YouTube channel for spreading what he calls groundless allegations about a controversial drinking party.
Han said in a personal statement that Kim, YouTube channel “Citizen Press The Tamsa TV” and its officials will be held “criminally and civilly” liable for spreading obviously false information on him via YouTube and other methods.
Kim alleged in a parliamentary inspection of the justice ministry the previous day that Han had a late-night drinking party at a luxury bar in Cheongdam-dong, southern Seoul, on July 19 and 20 with President Yoon Suk-yeol and 30 lawyers from Kim & Chang, the country’s top law firm.
Citizen Press The Tamsa TV, which is now under police investigation for tailing Han for nearly a month on the minister’s way home from work, raised the same allegations on the day.
Han categorically rejected the allegations, saying he had never been to the luxury bar and felt insulted by Kim’s false accusations.
I am not sure what the prosecutors are hoping to find with this raid because you would think any evidence would have long been removed if it existed at all:
An apparently tearful opposition leader Lee Jae-myung cried foul Monday after prosecutors raided the headquarters of his Democratic Party (DP) in a corruption investigation that is zeroing in on him after the arrest of one of his closest aides.
Investigators made their way into the DP headquarters to search the office of Kim Yong, a longtime confidant of Lee, over allegations that he took 847 million won (US$591,000) from property developers in the suburban city of Seongnam in violation of the political fund law.
Kim, who was arrested Saturday, is deputy head of the DP-affiliated Institute for Democracy think tank. It was the second attempt to raid the DP headquarters after an earlier attempt fell through due to protests from party officials.
“The central headquarters building of the opposition party was violated in the middle of a parliamentary audit,” Lee told reporters in front of the party headquarters. “A terrible incident unprecedented in the history of democracy in the Republic of Korea is happening now.”
While speaking, Lee apparently became tearful, looked up at the sky and wiped his eye.
You can read more at the link, but this is just another example of the rule by law in South Korea instead of rule of law. Whatever political party is in power uses the rule by law principle to go after their political enemies and this is just the continuation of this.