The Duran Podcast - South Korea political crisis deepens

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

South Korea political crisis deepens

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the situation in South Korea. Looks like we have another president on his way out. The South Korean government is starting to resemble the government in the UK. Can I say that? Liss trust, Rishi Sudak, Boris Johnson. I mean, we're running through a lot of leaders now in South Korea. Of course, this follows up on the martial law that tried to be enacted about three weeks ago. I want to say.

Yeah. It would be three weeks ago, four weeks ago. And it looks like South Korea has not been able to find any stability since that event. So what are your thoughts on what's going on in South Korea? What we're looking at in South Korea is a deepening political crisis. And this is, if it continues for much longer, it's inevitably going to impact on the economy. And it begs the question of why we are in this crisis. crisis. So let's just go over events. So the man who is still the president, President

Youen, went and tried to announce completely out of the blue that he was imposing marshal of the country. And he sent the military into the parliament, said that he was going to close down newspapers, arrest political leaders, do all sorts of things like that. The Parliament resisted this decree. The martial law operation, which is basically a coup, collapsed, the President was left exposed, his defence minister was forced to resign. It looked as if he was completely discredited.

After some trouble, the Parliament passed a decree, passed a vote, impeaching him. He is, of course, still there because the final decision, has to be certified by South Korea's constitutional court. Now, the problem is that there are insufficient judges, or at least there are sufficient judges in theory to vote an impeachment, but there's only six judges on the constitutional court. They would all have to vote for impeachment in order for the president to be impeached.

And the reason is because the current president, And the new acting president, the president who's taken over running of the government, whilst the president is going through impeachment proceedings, have refused to appoint to fill vacancies on the constitutional court. Now, the fact that the former president refused to do that, I'm going to suggest it's clearly a sign he didn't want the constitutional court, any of his decisions, including perhaps his martial law decree. The fact that the acting president, the man who took over from the president,

who is the leader, by the way, the parliamentary leader of the president's own party, the fact that he also refused to nominate candidates to fill the vacancies in the constitutional court is. very interesting because it looks as if the acting president is also trying to sabotage the impeachment proceedings. He's trying to keep the constitutional court with only a limited number of judges so that a majority to impeach the president cannot be found. And the parliament, having impeached, voted to impeach the president, are very angry about the fact that the acting president

is trying to sabotage the president's impeachment in that way. So they've now voted to impeach him also. And the next acting president is going to be the country's finance minister. Also, by the way, belongs to the president's party. So what we see is the regime, the government, the presidency, through its various allies, trying to sabotage the impeachment process by preventing appointments to the constitutional court. Now, why are so many people in South Korea, well-connected people, like the leader of the president's party who opposed the South's

law degree? Why are they all prepared to do this? And I'm going to make a suggestion. I think that what they want is to avoid early elections, which would happen if the president's impeachment were confirmed. They're worried that if there were elections, the opposition would win an overwhelming majority, which it would certainly do. And then, of course, when that happens, the opposition have already promised major investigations into how the martial law decree was put together, in which case those investigations might start to find that all sorts of people were involved and that it had been discussed with all sorts of people. And I wonder whether some of those people were located in the American embassy.

which I think plays such a critically important in South Korean political life that I find it very difficult to believe that a decision to declare martial law could have been made without them being consulted. Just say, speculation, but that's the best explanation I can come up with. Well, the US and the Biden White House, the State Department, has been very quiet on the whole South Korea thing. to put it wrongly. I think that tells you everything, right?

Yeah. I think that, I mean, I'm going to say it straightforwardly. I think a lot of people have been lobbying to try to get the impeachment process stopped because they don't want elections and they don't want their own role investigated. And I'm pretty sure the administration in Washington has been one of those parties that has been lobbying in that way. Also, look at the media coverage of this story in the West. South Korea is a hugely important country. It's got a population, what is it, 40 million people?

It's a major US ally. It is an industrial and economic powerhouse. It's a technological powerhouse. It too, by the way, people overlook this fat. Makes very high-end chips. Just saying they do it too. Samsung does. You would have thought that a political crisis, obviously,

this kind in a country like South Korea would be attracting a huge amount of attention. Not only is it not doing so, but when you read articles about it in newspapers, media outlets in the West, mainstream ones, what they basically say is, oh, it's really very sad that this has happened. The US might be losing this very reliable ally in President Yun. they avoid analyzing the crisis or looking at the underlying questions and asking the kind of questions that we've been asking on our programs when we've covered this. And they've been going along with the fiction, you know, that this is just a crisis and unhappy accident.

And what a shame because this man who we were getting on with so well looks like he might be in political trouble and might have to quit the scene. So all of that so different from the way the United States and the Western media and other Western governments behave when countries do things internally that they don't like. And it suggests to me that they're not only deeply embarrassed about this affair, but that they also want to keep this. shut down. They don't want this thing investigated, as it ought to be. Yeah, I mean, I still find it amazing that they actually thought that they would get away with martial law. I do think they understand North South Korea very well. That sounds incredible, given how big the presence of the U.S. is in South Korea. You have to go to South Korea to see how big the U.S. presence is.

But of course, there's soldiers, lots of American soldiers, lots of American officers. South Korea, they have all their contacts in South Korean society, but I often get the impression that the embassies, the high-level people there don't. They spend all their time talking to the important people who they think are important, in the military, in the intelligence apparatus, in the political parties. And I think that they haven't understood what a politically vibrant and sophisticated society, South Korea nowadays is. So I think that they probably thought that, you know, because there'd be military governments in South Korea in the past, it will be quite a straightforward thing. We take over. There'll be a limited amount of protest and opposition,

but we can handle that. The army will be reliable. The police will be reliable. The president has all the formal powers he needs. And, you know, if we can have a stable and strong South Korea that way, one that will be anti-China, one that will be anti-Russia, one that will sell arms to Ukraine, and one which will deepen the alliance with Japan. And I think, you know, this is probably what they all assumed, because they talk to the wrong people.

Yeah, you marginalize the, or you get rid of the... the opposition as well. And I think this is a trend that that is happening throughout the collective West, if we can call South Korea, a part of the collective West grouping of countries. Yeah, you make it so that there is no opposition to your political policies and ambitions and aspirations. You see it in Romania.

Maybe you're going to see it in Germany with the Haftair rising in South Korea. They took a different approach or they tried to take a different approach. This is becoming in Georgia as well. This is becoming a trend that we see playing out in country after country after country. Absolutely. I mean, Romania is perhaps the most extreme example of this. But I mean, and, you know, there's now moves to ban Georgioscu from standing again. I'm not sure on what ground, by the way, but anyway, they're talking.

about doing it. Even though it's been proven that he had nothing to do with any of this, is actually the P&L party in Romania. But it doesn't matter. That's my point. It doesn't matter. And they're doing the same with the IFDA. The opinion polls are now showing the after rising. Alice Vidal, who is the IFDIS candidate for the chancellorship, is now polling better than Mouts. But, you know, there's debates about banning the IFTA. The initiative coming from various MPs of the CDU. Mounce's party.

So, you know, you can see what's going on. But, you're absolutely right. It's part of the trend. All right. We will leave it there. The durand.com. We are on Rumble Odyssey, butchuttrele, Raffin'N, and X. And go to the Duran Shop, pick up some merch like what you see in this video update today.

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