The Failed Self-Coup in South Korea as a Lesson in Strongman Psychology; Video of Dec. 1 Q&A
Here is a 2024 U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief I co-wrote with democracy scholars Rachel Kleinfeld, Larry Diamond, Timothy Snyder, and Sherri Berman (Kleinfeld was lead author) that includes a section on refusals to leave power (pp.6-13), which is the theme of today’s essay. It places the Jan 6 coup attempt in global perspective. The sections on how autocrats use or ally with armed gangs and militias is also relevant for what could be shaping up in the United States. I hope you find it useful.
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“The essence of democracy is not about avoiding mistakes entirely, but about having the opportunities to learn from them,” Prof. Sungmin Cho, a political scientist at Sungkyunkwan University commented on X in the aftermath of this week’s failed self-coup by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol. “In non-democracy, rulers pretend they do not make mistake[s]. When they do, they do not allow citizens to discuss and learn from it.”
It is easy to take democracy for granted, and there is nothing like a coup attempt to remind us of how precious our freedoms and rights are –including the freedom of opposition politicians, the media, and the public to criticize a sitting leader, and the right of legislators to start an impeachment process if they feel that leader is corrupt or incompetent.
A “self-coup” occurs when a sitting leader faces ejection from office due to a lost election, an impeachment, or prosecution, and takes exceptional measures to remain in power.
This is what happened in South Korea, where the opposition Democratic Party of Korea and other stakeholders were calling for Yoon’s resignation or impeachment. The president’s popular approval had fallen to 19%, as per a Gallup Korea poll; thousands of doctors had been on strike to protest his health care reforms; and his misogynist views had alienated many women and younger South Koreans.
In South Korea, the constitution gives the president power to declare martial law at a time of national emergency, but despite Yoon’s claims of an impending threat from Communist North Korea, the only emergency was primarily a personal one for Yoon. He would have potentially had to step down and also face an influence-peddling scandal without the protections of high office.
Authoritarians have a proprietary notion of power: they don’t recognize boundaries between public and private. For the autocrat, having to leave office and endure the shame of impeachment and possible prosecution is itself sufficient to warrant exceptional action.
So, Yoon declared martial law, citing reasons that recur throughout the history of coups and other authoritarian moves: the threat of communist takeover (in this case, supposed infiltration of the opposition party by North Korean operatives) and the “paralysis” of government in a “collapsing” society.
Yoon knew the stakes: the opposition had control of the legislature, and his People Power Party had not been subject to processes of autocratic capture that made it a personal tool of the leader (as Donald Trump has done with the GOP). As with other cornered leaders of illiberal tendencies, though, desperation won out.
As Prof. Robert E. Kelly, a specialist in Korean politics, observed on X: “Declaring martial law in response to the gridlock of divided government is just a ridiculous rationale…It was remarkably inept. In fact, it looks impulsive, as if Yoon decided this on the same day…Yoon seemed to have no plan to deal with the predictable explosion of public protest.”
Strongmen leaders, wrapped up in their own illusions of grandeur, routinely underestimate the desires of people to retain their freedoms and organize to protect them, no matter the cost to themselves. Vladimir Putin certainly miscalculated the resolve of President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people in invading Ukraine.
The will to take collective action in defense of democracy can be especially robust if memories of dictatorship in that country are recent, which means that “democracy” is not something abstract and people know exactly how their daily lives will be affected when it is replaced with something else.
This is the case in South Korea, which transitioned to democracy only after 1987. The protests, streamed live on the world’s social media platforms and news outlets, included 190 of 300 legislators arriving in the night to vote to nullify the declaration of martial law.
As with the 2023 failed self-coup in Brazil, which ended with former president Jair Bolsonaro convicted of electoral fraud and banned from politics until 2030, Yoon’s authoritarian action backfired. Opposition party lawmakers have already filed a motion to impeach him, while protesters continue to keep vigils for their democracy and demand that he resign. Even if Yoon survives the impeachment vote, his mandate to govern will grow even more fragile.
In countries where democracy has been vanquished, challenges to the authoritarian leader often now lead to closer relations or new levels of involvement with other regimes, who act to shore up the ailing despot, following the strongman psychology bedrock principle: when one falls, we all are weakened.
Thus China has approved North Korean soldiers being deployed to Ukraine to help Russia, and the Xi regime has started to contemplate some form of Chinese armed support to the Myanmar junta, which is losing the civil war against the resistance.
In this regard, Korea expert Kelly’s comments on the potential “Trump effect” on international relations are a reminder of the very different outcome of the failed United States 2021 self-coup. He assumes, likely correctly, that Trump would approve of the power grab.
“Yoon does not seem to have given thought to how SK’s partners would react. Did he really think that the liberal community of states (US, Japan, EU) would just accept the cessation of SK constitutional government on such flimsy grounds? If this really was supposed to be a coup, then Yoon should have waited for Trump to become POTUS again in January. T[rump] tried something like this himself. Yoon has to go.”
As Sungmin Cho observed, democracy is renewed through our willingness to critique our elected leaders. We must be truth-tellers about the damage authoritarians do to societies, and about the disastrous effects of their brutality and hubris. This punctures their self-serving fictions that they are all-powerful, infallible, and “saviors of the nation.”
Studying the failures of autocrats, and why they do what they do, gives us valuable information on how to oppose them, as does learning from cases when prompt action has been taken against their power grabs. Above all, we can honor those around the world who have the courage to resist authoritarian aggression at critical junctures of history. We will need those lessons going forward.