South Korean President Yoon vows to ‘fight to the end’, defies impeachment threat Reuters

By Hionhee Shin and Ju-min Park

SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said on Thursday he would “fight to the end” as his political party moved closer to a vote with the opposition to impeach him over his short-lived emergency law that threw off the U.S. ally. into turmoil.

In a lengthy televised address, he alleged that North Korea had hacked South Korea’s election commission, casting doubt on his party’s landslide election defeat in April.

Yoon, whose country has Asia’s fourth-largest economy, hopes political allies will rally behind him, but that looked less likely after his speech. The leader of his ruling People Power Party (PPP) said the time had come for Yoon to resign or be impeached by parliament.

Late on Wednesday, six opposition parties led by the Democratic Party submitted a bill to parliament to impeach Yoon. The vote is expected on Saturday, a week after the first failed as most PPP members boycotted.

At least seven party members are expected to support the new impeachment motion. The two-thirds majority needed to impeach Ion requires at least eight PPP votes.

Jun said the opposition was “doing a dance of madness with swords” in an attempt to oust the democratically elected president, nine days after he failed to give the military sweeping powers.

I will fight until the end,” he said. “Whether they impeach me or start an investigation, I will face everything openly.”

The statement was his first since he apologized on Saturday and said he would leave his fate in the hands of his party.

His defiant new comments raise the possibility that Yoon, a career prosecutor and legal expert, may have decided to take his chances in court, hoping to make a comeback.

“It seems that he just doesn’t want to back down and is trying to hold on, because he still thinks he did the right thing,” said Shin Yul, a professor of political science at Myeonggi University.

A vote to impeach Ion would send the case to the Constitutional Court, which has six months to decide whether to remove him from office or reinstate him.

In the latest sign that Yoon is losing power, PPP leader Han Dong-Hun told a meeting of party members on Thursday that they should join the opposition to impeach the president.

The party remains divided and Yoon still has the support of some PPP MPs who oppose the impeachment.

Yoon is under separate criminal investigation over the alleged rebellion over the Dec. 3 declaration of a state of emergency, which he withdrew hours later, sparking South Korea’s biggest political crisis in decades.

In comments that reiterated his justification for declaring martial law in the first place, Yun said “criminal groups” that have paralyzed state affairs and disrupted the rule of law must be prevented from taking power at all costs.

He criticized the opposition Democratic Party, which blocked some of his proposals and demanded that his wife be investigated for alleged wrongdoing. He gave no evidence of criminal activity.

Democratic Party leadership member Kim Min-seok said Yun’s address was a “display of extreme delusion” and called on members of the president’s party to join the impeachment vote.

NORTH KOREAN HACK

Yoon spoke at length about the alleged hacking of the National Election Commission (NEC) by communist-ruled North Korea last year, without citing evidence.

He said the attack was discovered by the National Intelligence Service, but the commission, an independent agency, refused to cooperate fully in the investigation and inspection of its system.

Haq cast doubt on the integrity of the April 2024 elections – which his party lost by a landslide – and led him to declare a state of emergency, he said.

The commission said that by raising suspicions of election irregularities, Jun is committing a “self-defeating act against the election monitoring system that elected himself president.”

The NEC said it consulted the spy agency last year to address “security weaknesses”, but there were no signs North Korea had compromised the election system.

Jun won the presidency in March 2022 by the narrowest margin in South Korea’s democratic history.

Soldiers entered the election commission’s computer server room after Joon’s declaration of a state of emergency, officials said and showed closed-circuit television footage. It was not clear if they removed any equipment.

Jun defended his decision to declare martial law as a symbolic move aimed at exposing an opposition plot to “completely destroy the country”.

He denied ordering the blockade of parliament or trying to stop its business.

This contradicts the testimony of a military officer who was ordered by Yoon to enter parliament and remove MPs who had gathered to vote to lift the martial law.