ED Korea’s democratic erosion

President Yoon Suk Yeol has a generally good reputation in Washington, based primarily on his efforts to improve relations with Japan and strengthen the trilateral defense alliance with the U.S. in Northeast Asia. Less attention has been paid to what critics say are his authoritarian tendencies, part of a troubling global trend of democratic erosion.

The lack of attention on this issue may reflect the fact that Korea is widely seen by Americans through the lens of national security. Few articles have appeared in the U.S. media about Yoon’s controversial domestic policies.

One notable exception was a recent article in the New Yorker, which described how “Yoon, a career prosecutor with no previous experience in politics, has started to scrape away protections for women, the right to associate and organize, and, most strikingly, freedom of the press.” It was only last week that the New York Times, regarded as the standard bearer of foreign coverage in the U.S. media, finally decided to devote a lengthy article to the growing polarization of Korean politics caused by Yoon’s actions.

Perhaps Yoon’s crackdown on the Korean media, such as his battle with broadcaster MBC, will start to produce more such stories in the U.S. since American journalists are particularly sensitive to issues of press freedom, whether at home or abroad.

“So much of the foreign-policy establishment was gleeful when Yoon was elected,” Jake Werner of the Washington-based Quincy Institute told the New Yorker. The Biden administration has ignored the fact that “it’s authoritarians who are welcoming the direction we’re taking in foreign policy” when it comes to China.

Among independent analysts in Washington who closely follow Korean domestic politics, there are worries that Yoon’s actions could threaten the country’s stability and weaken the defense alliance that the president says he is seeking to strengthen by instead provoking a backlash.

They note that members of the Yoon government and its supporters have used terms such as "gongbi" (commie) to attack critics. “Such terms were last heard in the 1970s and 1980s during the Park (Chung-hee) and Chun (Doo-hwan) dictatorships. This will only increase political polarization,” said one former U.S. official with long experience in dealing with Korea.

Yoon has embraced "culture war" issues that connect him to global populist right-wing movements. These include his anti-feminist stance such as threatening to close the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, and anti-immigrant measures such as closing support centers for them.

Other troubling signs include Yoon’s reliance on a team of aggressive prosecutors, his former colleagues, to investigate political opponents, including Lee Jae-myung, who ran against Yoon and narrowly lost the presidential election. This is occurring against the backdrop of internal divisions in the opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), which is split between a faction supporting Lee and those who want to dump him as party leader.

Whether this will cause the DPK to lose its National Assembly majority in next April’s election remains an open question. Both the ruling People Power Party (PPP) and DPK are unpopular, with support levels in the low 30s for both, which matches the favorability ratings for Yoon and Lee.

One sign that the DPK may be on the rebound was its recent landslide victory in the Gangseo District chief by-election, which was formerly held by the PPP. This has led to a party shake-up, with naturalized Ihn Yo-han (known to many foreigners as John Linton, head of the international clinic at Seoul’s Severance Hospital) to head the PPP’s reform committee. Ihn, who supported Park Geun-hye in her presidential campaign, may have been tapped to give the party a more international look.

Despite whoever comes out on top in the forthcoming elections, the conditions that threaten democracy in Korea will remain. Some of them are deeply embedded, including corruption, the lack of protection of minority rights and Cold War-era national security laws still on the books.

Increased political polarization is often produced by growing economic inequality and Korea has one of the highest income gaps among advanced countries. The public’s heavy reliance on conspiracy-tinged social media is feeding their disenchantment with the two main political parties, potentially paving the way for politicians on both the extreme right or left.

This also makes it harder to reach a consensus on economic and foreign policy, which is already difficult to achieve due to the fact that Korean politics is often personality-driven rather than based on policy-making or ideology.

Korea still has time to change the dangerous path it is treading. It has not yet reached the same stage of democratic crisis that the United States is facing, with a dysfunctional Congress and populist demagogues seeking the presidency. But it needs to begin conducting a serious bipartisan dialogue on the state of democracy and how to protect it to prevent such crisis from happening.

John Burton (johnburtonft@yahoo.com), a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and consultant.