A Tough Year for South Korea’s President Yoon

December 2023 was the cruelest month for South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol. South Koreans were still seething over their failed bid to host the World Expo 2030, for which Yoon apologized. Then Yoon’s wife, First Lady Kim Keon-hee, was caught on camera receiving a designer handbag from one of her acquaintances, a violation of South Korea’s anti-graft act. The Prosecutor’s Office has yet to indict. Voters defied partisan lines in their anger over the fact that Kim was above the law.

The ruling People Power Party (PPP) predicted in its December analysis that it could win only six out of 49 seats from Seoul in the upcoming 2024 legislative elections. That would be the worst performance by a conservative party in South Korea’s history. Given that the opposition Democratic Party (DP) already holds the majority in the National Assembly, the idea of ceding even more seats to the other side is anathema to Yoon. 

No wonder the mood was funereal for those gathered to see Yoon off before he boarded a flight to the Netherlands for a state visit, his last journey abroad in 2023. 

But there’s more behind Yoon’s long face. The following is a brief overview of the Yoon administration’s highs and lows in 2023.

Yoon kicked off 2023 by pardoning Lee Myung-bak, a former conservative president jailed in 2020 for embezzlement and graft. Yoon’s presidential pardon earned much criticism for perpetuating the notion that justice takes a back seat to political convenience. Still, the pardon endeared him to historically conservative regions, a much-needed step for a political rookie with no firm support base. 

The 2022 Itaewon Halloween tragedy, where 159 people, mostly young adults, died in a crowd crush, still haunts the Yoon administration. In February 2023, the National Assembly impeached Interior Minister Lee Sang-min for having failed to take precautions prior to the incident, and for not responding quickly as the situation deteriorated. An internal report had predicted a huge crowd surge during the first post-pandemic Halloween celebration in Itaewon, yet the authorities stationed a paltry police force on the day of the disaster. Higher-ups, including Lee, evaded responsibility, instead finding scapegoats among their subordinates. The Constitutional Court acquitted him in July.

The Yoon administration ignored the bereaved families and their voices calling for justice, including skipping a one-year memorial event. Only in December did the PPP, conscious of its eroded popularity, propose a bill offering a relief package for the victims and instituting measures to prevent similar accidents.

The government has also been disregarding former marines and the family of Corporal Chae, a marine who drowned in a flood as a result of senseless orders to undertake a rescue mission without proper safety gear. Conscription is a touchy matter among young South Korean men, and the military’s cruel treatment of a conscript sparked indignation. 

Colonel Park Jung-hun, the head of the Marine Corps’ investigation unit, found his superiors guilty of duty negligence. But the then-defense minister ordered Park to drop the charge against the top brass and to implicate only the underlings. Park alleged that Yoon masterminded the cover-up. The defense minister resigned to stem further investigation. Litigation against Park is still ongoing. Division Commander Lim, who issued the ill-fated order, is in a pickle, too. In October, a friend of Chae’s who survived the flood sued Lim for sending his soldiers to death. In December, a battalion commander sued him for wrongful orders and perjury. 

The administration’s immigration policy also spawned much debate. In 2023, South Korea admitted 110,000 migrant workers, a record number. While their harsh working conditions and labor abuse are hardly addressed, the Justice Ministry decided to increase the 2024 quota to 165,000. Reports at home and abroad censured the government for being irresponsible and callous – South Korea keeps recruiting more migrant workers only to expel them, rather than improving their livelihoods and finding ways to integrate them into society.

There were also some areas where the public commended Yoon. South Korea’s healthcare system had been buckling due to a lack of physicians. Yoon’s predecessors all failed to expand their ranks due to pressure and threats of strikes from the Korea Medical Association, a trade union for doctors. Yet Yoon didn’t bat an eye and is pushing for an education reform to train more doctors. Still, he has yet to come up with more incentives for physicians to stay in university hospitals and perform surgeries – for now, most physicians open up private practices in lucrative fields that don’t really save lives.

The other bright spot was Yoon’s financial support for the self-employment sector. In the early 2010s, the self-employment sector made up a third of South Korea’s entire labor force. As online sales and COVID-19 crippled their livelihoods, the sector shrunk below 20 percent. Meanwhile, debt ballooned. The administration bucked the global trend of rising interest rates, repeatedly freezing the Bank of Korea’s standard interest rate to relieve the interest burden on household debt. In December, Yoon also announced a relief package worth $23 billion for the self-employment sector. Economy wonks may disagree, but Yoon received a grand whoop from representatives of the sector in November. 

Yoon was more comfortable abroad. He made good on his campaign promise to end South Korea’s decades-old policy of toeing the line between China and the West. His most urgent efforts went to establish Seoul-Tokyo-Washington trilateral security relations. He extended an olive branch to Tokyo, with which Seoul had been locked in diplomatic and trade disputes due to differing views on Japan’s wartime atrocities. Yoon’s conciliatory approach drew much opprobrium at home – he created an arrangement where victims of forced labor are compensated through donations from South Korean companies, basically absolving Japanese companies of their court-ordered responsibility for wartime crimes. Even more controversially, Yoon supported Japan’s decision to release treated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

Still, there were fruits to his effort. Yoon met his Japanese counterpart seven times in 2023. They restored the Seoul-Tokyo exchange of military intelligence, South Korea’s access to Japan’s critical exports, and regular bilateral summits.

South Korea became a more staunch Washington ally. In April, U.S. President Joe Biden and Yoon signed the “Washington Declaration,” which affirmed Washington’s promise of extended deterrence and established a Nuclear Consultative Group. The two also agreed to mutually monitor and share information on North Korea’s nuclear activities and station U.S. strategic assets around the Korean Peninsula on a regular basis.

Yoon more firmly nestled South Korea in the Western camp. In May, he attended the G-7 summit in Hiroshima, holding numerous bilateral meetings on the sidelines and confirming his dedication to fighting climate change and security challenges. In July, he participated in the NATO summit in Vilnius. (In June 2022, Yoon became the first South Korean president to attend a NATO summit, incurring ire from China and Russia.) His message was clear: South Korea’s security landscape welcomes the West, not autocracies. 

The Seoul-Tokyo-Washington summit in Camp David in August ramped up this commitment. The three reaffirmed their ambitions for a better, safer Indo-Pacific “backed by the full range of U.S. capabilities” and security and technology cooperation. They followed up on it in November in San Francisco, where Yoon and the Japanese prime minister unveiled their plan to fund research in the high-tech industry, such as AI and renewable energy.

Not surprisingly, China didn’t take kindly to Yoon’s foreign policy. For the most of 2023, China either rebuffed South Korea’s calls for high-level talks or unilaterally canceled them last minute. Beijing is still blocking imports of South Korean cultural contents. Yoon was bashed at home for alienating China, which influenced African and Latin American nations to recant their support for Busan’s World Expo bid. 

Still, the good news is that foreign ministers from China, South Korea, and Japan held a trilateral meeting in Busan in late November. They meant it to lead to a trilateral summit for their bosses toward the end of 2023, but that was pushed to early 2024. Perhaps the new year will bring in a new beginning. 

All in all, Yoon had a rough year. He’s started to smile less at home and his gait is less brisk. Regardless of his faults and fortes, however, there’s no doubt South Koreans would wish the best for both Yoon and their country this year.