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This year will go down in history as an annus horribilis for South Korea. December alone has seen a series of crises. The month started with the then-President Yoon Suk-yeol’s invocation of martial law. Just over two weeks and two (acting) presidents later, the month has ended in tragedy. The fatal crash of a Jeju Air flight from Bangkok at Muan International Airport (in the south of the country), killing 179 out of 181 passengers, will go down as one of the deadliest aviation incidents in South Korean history.
The Jeju Air plane crash is a massive shock for a country with such a strong aviation safety record. Before this week, South Korea’s most recent aviation incident involved the vice-president of Korean Air delaying a flight after having been served nuts in their original packaging instead of on crockery.
South Korea has seen aviation disasters in the more distant past. In 1983, the Soviet Union notoriously shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007, killing everyone on board. The passenger jet — a Boeing 747-300 — was mistaken for a US intelligence aircraft as it entered Soviet airspace. Nearly fifteen years later, in 1997, another Korean Airlines flight crashed on approach to its destination in Guam, killing 229 out of 254 people on board. South Korean airlines suffered from what is called a high “cockpit gradient” — the power differential between the captain and first officer. In the Guam crash the first officer and flight engineer refused to challenge the captain’s flawed decision-making, culminating in disaster.
In response to this week’s crash, the conflict-ridden ruling government has declared a seven-day period of mourning. Seoul will now have to put intra- and inter-party factionalism to one side as it responds to the tragedy. The authorities must act quickly to identify the victims and inform families; find out the causes of the crash; and prevent such catastrophes in the future.
This will not be an easy task given the current state of the government. Since its transition to democracy in the late 1980s, the young state of South Korea has been no stranger to domestic political furore. Whether it has been presidential impeachments, imprisonments, or accusations of corruption and abuse of power, almost every South Korean leader has been mired in some form of scandal and skulduggery. Retirements from office have rarely been anything but peaceful.
Yet 2024 will go down in history as the first time that an acting South Korean president has been impeached, after lawmakers voted to remove the caretaker leader from power earlier this week, on the grounds that he was delaying the impeachment process of his unpopular predecessor.
The leader of the main opposition party — the leftist Democratic Party — Lee Jae-myung, decried acting president Han Duck-soo as “acting for insurrection,” and accused him of being complicit in Yoon’s sudden decree of martial law on December 3. Lee himself is no benign actor, having himself been engulfed in personal and political scandal long before this month.
Much of the opposition’s desire to impeach Han was based on his hesitation in appointing three additional judges to South Korea’s Constitutional Court, to make a full bench of nine. Whilst the current six-member bench is sufficient to assess whether or not former president Yoon Suk-yeol should be removed for good, the lack of current justices means that only one veto, instead of the usual four, is needed to block his removal.
When the week of mourning is over, the country once bestowed with the moniker of “the land of the morning calm” will face multiple, simultaneous tests at a time when it seeks to uphold democratic order in a turbulent domestic and global political environment.
Beyond issues at home, the ruling government will have to deal with a plummeting South Korean won; a new administration in Japan under Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba; and, of course, the arrival of Donald Trump 2.0 in the Oval Office. To add to these challenges, we must also not forget North Korea. Hours before the Jeju Air airplane plunged to its deadly fate, Kim Jong-un warned the United States to prepare for Pyongyang’s “most hardline” policy yet, paving the way for a new year of further provocations not just towards Washington but against its self-designated “primary foe,” what it calls the “US puppet state” of Seoul.
For now, the leadership of South Korea rests with Choi Sang-mook, the country’s finance minister, who is simultaneously serving as acting president — the second in as many weeks — and acting prime minister. In 2022, the now-former president argued in his pre-election campaign that South Korea needed to “step up” on the global stage. South Korea indeed must step up, on all fronts. It must show its people — and the world — just how resilient it is as a democracy.
