Korea on the brink

Park Jung-won

By Park Jung-won

• Published Dec 4, 2025 4:50 PM KST

There is a certain heaviness that descends on anyone who watches the proceedings of Korea’s National Assembly Judiciary Committee today. What should be the institutional heart of democratic deliberation increasingly resembles something far more unsettling — a chamber where constitutional norms bend to partisan strategy, and where procedural fairness has been replaced by tactical obstruction.

Under a committee chairperson from the ruling Democratic Party of Korea who repeatedly curtails opposition voices and interprets parliamentary rules in ways that consistently favor her own side, the committee has drifted far from its intended function. It no longer operates as a guardian of legislative integrity but rather as a zone of partisan combat, where political instincts for survival overshadow any sense of constitutional responsibility.

This erosion of institutional seriousness came into stark relief with the prosecutors’ decision to drop their appeal in the Daejang-dong corruption case — arguably the largest real estate corruption scheme ever uncovered in Korea. Bringing such a case to an end without higher-court scrutiny is not an administrative anomaly; it is a signal of institutional breakdown.

A judicial system that relinquishes review in a case of this magnitude signals a deeper fragility — a vulnerability that cannot easily be explained away. That enormous illicit gains may now be effectively secured by those implicated, and that the administration has demonstrated no interest in even a minimal procedural or legislative correction, lays bare a political culture where partisan interest crowds out the public good.

What heightens the unease is the president’s own inconsistency. When concerns recently arose that state-owned land had been sold at below-market prices, President Lee Jae Myung reacted immediately: Sales were suspended, reviews ordered, procedures tightened — all in the name of preventing harm to citizens. Yet this same principle evaporates in the far more serious Daejang-dong case. Silence — deep, deliberate and unbroken — has become the administration’s only response.

If the president is truly unconnected to the scandal, he should have been the first to voice public anger at the prosecutors’ decision and take immediate steps to prevent any illicit gains from flowing to those implicated in the Daejang-dong scheme. His silence instead reveals a sobering truth: In today’s political environment, appeals to justice and the public good are often exercised selectively, invoked or withheld according to political calculation.

Even more troubling was the president’s recent remark suggesting that prosecutors working on a case involving one of his former senior aides should be disciplined — a case in which allegations have also faintly touched on his own past decisions. Many legal experts warned that such a comment veers dangerously close to constitutionally prohibited interference in an ongoing trial. That a head of state would make such a statement, immediately upon returning from an overseas summit and amid deep national strain, has only reinforced the perception that personal legal anxieties are beginning to overshadow the country’s urgent priorities.

Selective principles can be corrosive. Such behavior seeps into the larger political culture, eroding trust and weakening the foundation of democratic life. The ruling camp’s ongoing campaign of insurrection accusations illustrates this distortion with particular clarity.

Former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s martial law case is already before the courts. Special prosecutors, appointed by the National Assembly, are functioning normally. Yet the administration continues to frame the national conversation around the hunt for “internal collaborators.” This fixation is revealing, not because the details of the case remain unresolved — they are in fact progressing through the judiciary — but because it shows what the government chooses to prioritize at a time when Korea faces profound economic challenges.

Korea is not facing abstract risks. It is confronting the early contours of a systemic economic crisis. Recent developments such as the surging exchange rate, foreign capital flight, collapse in youth employment, erosion of the manufacturing base and a sharply deteriorating stock market are not routine fluctuations — they signal a breakdown of confidence at the heart of the Korean economy. In any functioning democracy, leaders facing danger of this scale would be focused on stabilization and national recovery — not on sustaining a partisan storyline.

Foreign and security policy have not escaped this logic. North Korea’s designation of the South as an “enemy state” and its explicit refusal to engage in dialogue should have prompted a sober reassessment of the security environment. Instead, the Ministry of Unification continues to cling to outdated terminology of reconciliation that no longer aligns with geopolitical reality.

Lee’s remarks about scaling back joint South Korea-U.S. military drills, combined with his claim that shortwave broadcasts to the North are unnecessary because “North Koreans already access the internet,” are not harmless slips — they are statements that could arise only from either a startling ignorance of North Korea’s basic realities or a willingness to indulge in political fantasy.

In either case, they force an unsettling question: In what world are the president and his unification minister living? Their shared, almost romanticized conception of the North reveals far more about their own political imaginations than about any actual conditions on the ground.

Where does Korea stand today? Is it still a functioning democracy, or merely the semblance of one? Koreans have pushed back against overreaching power before, by impeaching presidents, confronting corruption and reining in political excess through collective resistance.

That drift is already visible. Years of relentless factional conflict have exhausted the public and hollowed out democratic purpose. And now that the economic crisis — long evident beneath layers of political window dressing — is breaking into daily life, the old partisan divide simply collapses. When livelihoods falter, people do not rise as citizens of the left or the right; they rise as individuals confronting material threats. And once the basic calculus of survival takes hold, they can sweep aside political orders that once believed themselves secure.

Korea is a country with a long memory of resisting overreaching power — a memory that awakens slowly but, once stirred, moves with formidable force. Those who govern today would do well to remember this: Korean democracy has survived leaders who assumed themselves untouchable. It can do so again.

Park Jung-won (park_jungwon@hotmail.com), Ph.D. in law from the London School of Economics, is a professor of international law at Dankook University.