Bulletin No 53 decembre 2024 In South Korea, late at night on December 3, 2024, President Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law.
The army was then deployed around the parliament and throughout the country. 6 hours later martial law was lifted under pressure from both the parliament and the street.
Indeed, as soon as the martial law was announced [1], a strong popular movement was set up to demand its immediate lifting. In front of the South Korean parliament, hundreds of people gathered to protest against the president's decision.
The parliamentary staff were not left out as to prevent the illegal and unconstitutional entry of soldiers into the parliament premises several makeshift barricades were raised. Subsequently the soldiers cordoned off the assembly from outside, preventing parliamentarians from entering the premises.
Some of these parliamentarians were forced to climb over the entrance gate to be able to attend the vote. [2]
For many, the sending of the army is easily explained by the president because if the parliamentarians vote against the implementation of martial law, he is obliged to comply with their will. Preventing them from entering and voting is therefore the easiest way to prevent the lifting of the law.
It should be noted that in the South Korean parliament today, the majority is in opposition to the presidential party.
According to President Yoon Suk-Yeol, the martial law was intended to facilitate the elimination of “enemies of the state” (“anti-state forces”), more specifically the communist enemy (North Korea). It is more likely that this decision was taken to allow the South Korean president to maintain a grip on the country that was slipping away from him politically.
This is also the first time since the 1980s that the president has announced the establishment of martial law, recalling the dark hours of the Gwangju massacre [3] . This took place during the repression of a student movement demanding the democratization of South Korea and the end of martial law declared in 1979, the government's military repression had then caused at least a hundred deaths (and according to some historians between 600 and 2300).
After parliament voted to overturn the president's decision and postpone martial law, two more votes were held to try to remove the president.
The first vote came to nothing, but the second one did, with 204 votes for impeachment and 85 against.
In these votes for impeachment, a dozen came directly from the presidential party, which allowed the vote to pass.
The president has been banned from leaving South Korean soil since the vote (December 14), and has made public apologies for his decision to impose martial law. [4]
This decision by President Yoon Suk-Yeol to impose martial law does not come in a clear sky and in the most exemplary democracy in Asia. If South Korea has experienced significant economic development in recent decades (figure 1), it owes it to US aid and its deep integration into world trade with a dominance of trade with Asian countries and first and foremost China and the United States [5] .

Figure 1 Evolution of GNP from 1953 to 2002 [6]
This rapid progression has considerably increased inequalities within the population, while trade union freedoms were and still are flouted and trade union action is harshly repressed. The economic slowdown (figure 2) has led to a rise in social struggles, the most publicized recently being that of Samsung employees [7] .

Figure 2: Evolution of South Korea's GDP from 1965 to 2023
Social struggles, struggles for democratic freedoms and struggles for peace with the refusal to see South Korea associated with the escalation against the Democratic Republic of Korea, in the north and especially against China through participation in a military alliance, on the NATO model, led by the United States [8] who also want to associate Japan.
This situation calls into question the policy of unwavering alliance with the United States, which considers South Korea as a semi-colony , which led to the electoral defeat of the Conservative Party to the detriment of the Democratic Party in the last legislative elections of 2024 [9] .
We support the trade union and political organizations that have risen up to defeat the coup and are fighting for real recognition of workers' rights and the independence of South Korea from US domination.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-martial-law-north-korea-emergency-b310df4fece42c27051f58b8951f346f
[2] https://www.france24.com/fr/asie-pacifique/20241204-cor%C3%A9e-du-sud-s%C3%A9oul-parlement-investi-par-arm%C3%A9e-v%C3% A9cu-a-night-of-chaos
[4]https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2024/12/09/en-coree-du-sud-le-president-yoon-suk-yeol-a-interdiction-de-quitter-le-territoire- after-his-failed-attempt-to-impose-martial-law_6438076_3210.html