South Korean president declares martial law

The Sandbox Political Topics
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I don’t get it

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I just got out of a meeting and saw that the president declared martial law, and 190 lawmakers assembled and voted 190-0 to end it.

Someone needs to do a recap of what led up to this, because I’m not a South Korea political expert even in my spare time’s spare time.

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:popcorn:

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South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law late on Tuesday as he accused the country’s main opposition party of being overly sympathetic to North Korea and other “anti-state” activities.

That accusation is so outrageous that it just doesn’t make sense to me.

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I’m all for non-US political drama

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How is the president determined in SK?
Guessing popular vote, which is a steeeupid way to vote in that much power. Too many steeeupid people – even SK has them, I bet – to let them decide.
Even our founding fathers, well, the THIRD version of our founding fathers, knew it.

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I wonder how many EVs the North gets

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Seems to be on the shortlist for the worst coup ever. SK Parliament can end martial law by a simple majority vote, so as opposition party has the majority they met to do so and voted unanimously to end martial law (even his own party voted against). The military had been deployed to stop Parliament from meeting, and civilians drove them from the building. Opposition party is apparently saying he is no longer President, don’t know the basis for that.

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Turns out that in most countries, soldiers don’t want to shoot random civilians. And if the protestors believe that they won’t be hurt, they will physically push back.

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Seems to be the case. Leader of a right-wing conservative, anti-LGBT, anti-woman party tried to rally the military to take control, said his military could arrest anybody for no reason but also “we’ll minimize disruption to your life.”

The opposing party said, “Actually, we’d prefer to not” and voted that way, which obligates the President to stop coup’ing. Parliamentary aides are spraying fire extinguishers at the military ordered to take over the Assembly. Far as I can see it’s all in flux but I don’t see it going well for Yoon.

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I am also struggling to understand what exactly is going on.

Someone somewhere shorted SK stocks…?

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Lee Jae-myung, Leader of South Korea’s Democratic Party, live-streamed himself scaling the walls of the National Assembly to bypass military barricades so that he could vote to overturn the President’s martial law.

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Using a GoPro?

Asking for a friend.

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I’m sure we will get more news as the day. It is about 7:40 am in South Korea, so a lot of people are just getting up.

President Yoon has already changed his mind:

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/03/world/south-korea-martial-law

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Dude, we should go for Korean BBQ the next time I’m in town.

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Scary, South Korea was functionally a dictatorship through the 80s, so its living memory for a lot of people.

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It does sound like this was a bit more serious on the ground than what was being originally reported.

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This is now turning into a political soap opera.