The rise and fall of Park Geun-hye: the perils of South Korea’s weak party system

Abstract

The political turmoil prompted by the corruption scandal surrounding president Park Geun-hye and her confidante, Choi Soon-sil, convulsed South Korea in the winter of 2016/17. Park’s response was not only ineffective, but inflammatory. Intense public frustration, together with mounting circumstantial evidence, led to an impeachment process. Thus Park became the first democratically elected president to be removed. Political corruption is not new in South Korea. Yet, no previous case matches the magnitude of the Park debacle and no former president has had to sacrifice their term in office. This raises a key question: what is it that made this scandal so different? This article argues that the debate has so far paid insufficient attention to the role of the South Korean political system in explaining Park’s impeachment. The government party was the largest in the National Assembly and thus able to stop the impeachment process, but failed to do so. The article unpacks the political unrest of 2016/17 by analysing South Korean party politics, focussing specifically on the electoral structure that had been established in the post-1987 democratic era and the subsequent changes that conditioned and facilitated the political downfall of Park Geun-hye.