Who is Yoon Suk Yeol, South Korea’s leader?

Yoon Suk Yeol, president of South Korea, in Seoul in 2022. Photo / Woohae Cho, The New York Times

A conservative, Yoon Suk Yeol won the presidency in 2022 by a slim margin, promising a more confrontational stance against North Korea. He quickly became unpopular and divisive at home.

President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, who declared martial law Tuesday night (local time), and then lifted it hours later, has served a term plagued with problems and scandals following his narrow electoral win in 2022.

Yoon, a former prosecutor, won the presidency with less than half the vote, by a margin of less than 1% – a result that was widely viewed as a condemnation of his progressive predecessor rather than an enthusiastic endorsement of Yoon. As a candidate and in office he has allied himself with a wave of anti-feminist sentiment.

In office, the President has been in a near-constant political standoff with the opposition, which controls Parliament, ever since, while his approval rating in polls has fallen sharply.

His call for martial law, which allows him to clamp down on media and political opponents, was the first such declaration in South Korea in decades but was foreshadowed by some of his previous actions in office. Yoon, who is seen in South Korea as a deeply divisive leader, accused the opposition of plotting an “insurgency” and “trying to overthrow the free democracy”.

Since his election, Yoon has used lawsuits, state regulators and criminal investigations to clamp down on speech that he called disinformation, efforts that were largely aimed at news organisations. Police and prosecutors repeatedly raided the homes and newsrooms of journalists whom his office has accused of spreading “fake news”.

Yoon has also been accused of using his power to advance his own interests. He was accused this year of pressuring the Defence Ministry to whitewash an investigation into the death of a South Korean marine in 2023 and vetoed a bill pushed through Parliament by the opposition calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the claim.

Yoon’s wife, Kim Keon Hee, has also been at the centre of some of his troubles. Late last year, spy cam footage emerged showing Kim accepting a US$2200 ($3700) Dior pouch as a gift. The incident roiled his political party and became a significant issue in the run-up to parliamentary elections.

Kim had also faced allegations that she was involved in a stock price manipulation scheme before Yoon’s election. Last year, the opposition-controlled Parliament passed a bill that would have mandated a special prosecutor to investigate the claims. Yoon vetoed the bill.

Notably, relations with North Korea have sunk to longtime lows since Yoon took office. For decades, the two Koreas – which never signed a peace treaty after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce – have swung between conciliatory tones and sabre-rattling. North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, has been unpredictable and bellicose, developing nuclear weapons and supplying Russia with munitions and troops for its war against Ukraine.

Yoon has adopted a confrontational approach and called for spreading the idea of freedom to the North to penetrate the information blackout there. He has also expanded joint military drills with the United States and Japan.

North Korea, under Kim, has veered toward a more hawkish stance, shutting off all dialogue with Seoul and Washington, doubling down on testing nuclear-capable missiles, and vowing to treat South Korea not as a partner for reunification but as an enemy that the North must annex should war break out.

Early Wednesday, the National Assembly voted to lift martial law in a swift rebuke of the President’s drastic response to the political deadlock that had hobbled his tenure. The South Korean act on martial law states that if the assembly demands an end to it, the President must lift it “without delay”.

Later, Yoon said he would lift the emergency declaration of martial law he imposed as soon as he could convene his Cabinet.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Choe Sang-Hun and Ephrat Livni

Photographs by: Woohae Cho

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