The emphatic win for Lee Jae-myung, the left-wing Democratic Party (DP) leader, as South Korea’s president, shines a bright light on the country’s resilient democratic credentials. The verdict in Tuesday’s snap poll follows months of political upheaval when the ousted former president, Yoon Suk Yeol of the conservative People Power Party, declared martial law in December.
The naked power grab on that dark night, which Yoon justified on grounds of threats to national security and deployed troops to bar legislators’ entry into the National Assembly, only enraged them to have the order revoked within hours. The intense outrage that enveloped the country over the following fortnight led parliament to impeach Yoon by the year end, a decision unanimously upheld by Seoul’s Constitutional Court in April, stripping him of office midway through his presidential term. The tumultuous protests have brought into sharp relief the nation’s yet unfinished transition from decades of military rule. Thousands nostalgic for the old tyrannical order thronged the streets in support of the deposed Yoon, while large numbers rallied behind parliament and the courts to demand the enforcement of the rule of law.
President Lee, a firebrand former factory worker and once a highly polarising figure, signalled a pivot to the political centre ground in Wednesday’s inaugural address. Beyond bland assurances, he must initiate bold action to counter multiple domestic and global challenges. Foremost of them is a fiscal expansion drive to offset the demographic crisis—a shrinking and ageing population underpinned by the world’s lowest fertility rate—and persistently weak domestic demand. The plan will be sorely tested by the current sharp decline in growth in an export-dependent economy, amid an escalating trade war.
In the external arena, President Trump’s unrelenting attack on Seoul’s record trade surplus with Washington has left the future of the 2012 Korea-US (Korus) free-trade agreement more uncertain, besides competition from China. The country’s regional security concerns have also been amplified by North Korea’s rapid advances in sophisticated ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programmes and Pyongyang’s closer defence cooperation with Moscow. These developments are forcing South Korean politicians to rethink the conventional wisdom of Seoul’s reliance on Washington’s military umbrella. Some of them even think that the country should build its own nuclear arsenal.
Ominously, Pyongyang announced last year that it was abandoning a constitutional commitment to reunification with Seoul and revised its defence doctrine from a defensive to an offensive posture, legitimising pre-emptive atomic weapons strikes against non-nuclear adversaries. This is nothing short of a permanent state of escalation and uncertainty for the two countries, which officially remain in a state of war following the 1953 armistice after the conflict on the Korean Peninsula. The spirit of December 2024 must live on.
