Restoring Korea’s democratic integrity

Park Jung-won

By Park Jung-won

• Published Dec 31, 2025 4:00 PM KST

Korean democracy is not collapsing. It is entering a more subtle, precarious phase in which the erosion of principle is no longer clearly recognized as a problem. As 2026 begins, Korea still presents itself, at least formally, as a functioning democratic state. More than six months have passed since the current administration took office, and governance has moved well beyond its initial stage. The National Assembly legislates, courts issue rulings and the executive operates without visible disruption. There is no formal institutional vacuum and no obvious breakdown of constitutional machinery. However, a persistent sense of unease and fatigue continues to grow across Korean society.

This unease cannot be explained away simply by early policy failures or by the confusion that often follows a change of government. Nor can it be dismissed as a mere aftershock of electoral polarization. It has emerged more gradually through the manner in which the current government exercises state power in a way that increasingly suggests a diminished commitment to being constrained, justified and disciplined by principle.

Democracy is not defined by majority rule alone. Majority rule is a mechanism, not the essence. At its core, democracy concerns how power is exercised, and more importantly, by which principles it limits. When law is treated as a flexible tool and adjusted whenever political necessity demands, it ceases to function as a system of principle and becomes an instrument of power. The problem now facing Korea is not in the policy outcomes themselves, but in a deeper disturbance in the relationship between law and authority.

That underlying problem has become increasingly apparent in recent legislative developments. The creation of a special tribunal for insurrection-related cases and the tightening of controls over expression and information may appear unrelated. In substance, however, they raise the same fundamental question: Is the pre-existing legal framework truly inadequate?

Whether former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s declaration of martial law constitutes insurrection is currently under judicial review. Criminal law and ordinary court procedures already provide sufficient tools for such a determination. Once a separate judicial structure designed for specific offenses and specific political moments, if presented as necessary, the issue shifts. It becomes less about the gravity of the case than about confidence in the ordinary legal system and whether general rules are still trusted to govern exceptional situations.

The same logic applies to expression and information. Defamation, false statements, election offenses and related harms are already regulated by current laws. The renewed push for broader and more forceful regulation raises an unavoidable question: Is this truly about legal gaps, or about discomfort with speech that resists management through existing rules? When political unease, rather than legal necessity, drives institutional redesign, the costs are rarely confined to the immediate controversy.

As institutional forms are repeatedly reshaped to meet political circumstances, exceptions lose their temporary character and begin to solidify into a new baseline. Democracies rarely erode through dramatic rupture alone. More often, they are worn down internally through incremental, insufficiently explained changes that normalize what was once exceptional. What is being tested in Korea today is what the philosopher Ronald Dworkin, one of the most influential thinkers in modern legal theory, described as “law as integrity.” The idea is that law must remain intelligible as a coherent system of principle, rather than a sequence of ad hoc adjustments responding to immediate political needs.

This institutional drift is reinforced by how the current government narrates its own legitimacy. The administration has framed its rise to power as the moral overcoming of chaos produced by the previous president’s attempt to impose martial law, which the party portrays as an act of constitutional destruction. But resisting such an act, however justified, does not grant the new government unlimited moral authority or permanent exemption from constitutional restraint.

The Constitution grants no one the right to exercise present power without limits simply because they once stood against wrongdoing. If the law is a system of principles, political responsibility must also be continuous rather than episodic. The authority to condemn past abuses is sustained only through present self-restraint. When power casts itself as a moral exception, legal coherence erodes and democracy risks becoming a contest of narratives rather than a shared framework of obligation.

The erosion of principle is not confined to domestic governance. It extends into how a state understands its own security. This is why recent presidential remarks on North Korea have raised concerns — not because they suggest a conciliatory or hardline approach, but because they appear to reflect security judgments shaped less by constitutional responsibility and citizen safety than by an attempt to mirror how the North Korean regime views the world.

When language toward a nuclear-armed adversary is shaped by sympathy or a romantic narrative, it becomes a strategic signal. By recasting past governments as the source of hostility — despite an unchanged adversary — such narratives distort security judgment, reducing calculation to interpretation and relegating the pursuit of peace to a slogan rather than a strategy.

The familiar media trope of “self-reliance versus alliance” is little more than political wordplay, obscuring the reality that many so-called security debates amount to factional jockeying rather than principled disagreement — even as Washington and Pyongyang reposition themselves.

By contrast, the economic pressures that most directly shape daily life — currency instability, market anxiety, rising prices and soaring housing costs — receive remarkably little sustained attention from the president. As these fundamentals are left largely unaddressed in public discourse, political language shifts toward spectacle and governance begins to resemble performance when serious explanation is most needed. When a president falls silent on matters that are inconvenient and turns to live broadcasts only when the moment is politically favorable, the performance invites a blunt question: What, exactly, is the office meant for?

What Korea needs in 2026 is not a new democracy, but the restoration of principles it already knows. If this moment is misjudged, the consequences will have cold clarity.

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