December 4, 2025
SEOUL – One year after the Dec. 3 martial law crisis upended Korea’s constitutional order, the country confronts an uncomfortable truth: The institutions that resisted a president’s unlawful deployment of troops proved sturdier than many feared, yet the political class that presided over the collapse has learned almost nothing from it.
The broad facts appear largely settled. Courts now handle the trials of former President Yoon Suk Yeol and senior security officials. Major elements of the alleged chain of command, the planning and the attempted execution have been laid bare, even if important questions remain.
The trials of Yoon and more than 20 co-defendants, including former military and police chiefs, are indispensable not only for accountability but for establishing an authoritative record of how the crisis unfolded.
South Korea restored constitutional rule without violence and projected an administrative resilience that many democracies would struggle to match. Within hours of the declaration, the National Assembly overturned the decree and the acting police chief later issued a formal apology for restricting access to the legislature. These steps mattered. They signaled a recognizable commitment to democratic procedure, even amid institutional shock.
But the political response since then has been a disappointing mix of blame shifting, moral posturing and factional theatrics.
The conservative opposition People Power Party has been particularly adrift. It cannot decide something as basic as whether to apologize for the episode, divided between lawmakers who see contrition as essential to legitimacy and leaders still caught in the gravitational pull of the previous presidency.
The spectacle of senior figures flirting with revisionist narratives, even after impeachment, has cemented the perception that the party fears its loudest factions more than it respects the constitutional order. The result is a party with support stuck at a low level and no credible claim to be a governing alternative.
The trajectory of the governing coalition led by the Democratic Party of Korea offers only partial relief. It led the legal and institutional clean-up that voters expected, yet its posture has grown more punitive as the trials near their end. The push for new special tribunals risks looking less like democratic consolidation and more like partisan compulsion.
President Lee Jae Myung’s call for a second special counsel and a dedicated insurrection court may ensure procedural completeness, but it risks creating the impression that justice is being driven by the political calendar rather than institutional process.
Even if the motives are sound, the way the Democratic Party tries to score political points increasingly appears clumsy. A ruling party that leans on moral superiority rather than consensus-building will eventually discover the limits of its mandate.
The deeper tragedy is that both camps remain captive to their most strident supporters, offering mirror-image versions of the same flawed logic: That absolutism mobilizes better than responsibility. This mindset is precisely what made a martial law gambit politically thinkable a year ago. It is also why neither camp has produced a credible program for long-term renewal, whether on economic reform, demographic decline or national security.
All this unfolds against an economic backdrop that is better than feared yet worse than needed. Markets have steadied under the Lee administration and external risks have eased, but South Korea still confronts stagnant potential growth, persistent 1 percent real gross domestic product forecasts and a reform backlog that no coalition has had the courage to own.
Without structural changes to regulation, labor, pensions and education, the country’s growth ceiling will keep drifting downward, no matter how many crises it survives.
Anniversaries can clarify. A year after armored vehicles and troops were mobilized toward the National Assembly, South Korea’s institutions look durable, but its politics do not.
The Dec. 3 crisis was a warning. Its lessons remain unlearned.