With South Korea looking for a return to political stability, TaiwanPlus talks with Jaehan Park, international studies professor at Nanyang Technological University, for the latest on the turmoil in Seoul and how it's affecting the government there.
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00:00Jehan Park, now that President Eun Suk-yool has been impeached, how has the political
00:04and societal temperature changed?
00:07Obviously, a lot of people will say that the political climate in South Korea is pretty
00:11polarized and tense.
00:15This has been true along the regional cleavages, gender and generational lines.
00:22But I think at the elite level, the situation is a little bit more muted, or if you will,
00:27a little bit more sophisticated.
00:29So obviously, the immediate question is how to form the governing body to steer the crisis
00:35that South Korea is in.
00:38So the opposition party has been proposing that there should be an intra-party or bipartisan
00:46governing body to deal with the situation.
00:49In contrast, the ruling party has been arguing in favor of a ruling party and a coalition
00:55between the ruling party and the executive branch.
00:58I think that the fundamental issue that divides the parties is how to deal with the speed
01:06of impeachment process, and that that relates to the issue of the opposition party leader
01:12Lee Jae-myung's legal battles.
01:16So with that process in mind, what is the potential timetable for impeachment?
01:22According to our constitution, the constitutional court has to decide on the case within 180 days.
01:30Now there are some, you know, now President Yoon has been dragging his feet in terms of
01:35receiving the documents from the constitutional court and so on and so forth.
01:39But once the decision is made, there should be an election within a two-month time frame.
01:44So it can take anywhere from, you know, as early as four months all the way to eight
01:52months or something.
01:53If you look at the past instances, past instances, President Roe's impeachment trial took, give
01:59or take, 60 days.
02:00President Park's impeachment trial, it took nine days or so.
02:05And now the opposition party is calling the constitutional court to make the decision
02:11quicker.
02:13So we'll see what happens.
02:15There are some technical issues concerning the appointment of constitutional court judges,
02:19whether the acting president has the authority to do so, and if not, whether the constitutional
02:25court can decide on the case.
02:27What is the public sentiment towards the interim president, Han Duk-soo, and how can he effectively
02:32lead during this time of political turmoil?
02:36So one thing to note about him is that he, well, he's actually a very capable man who
02:41has served in both conservative and progressive administrations.
02:46I think he graduated from Seoul National on top of his class.
02:49He went to Harvard.
02:50He began his career as a public servant at the Economic Planning Board, which was cream
02:54of the crop of the Korean civil servants.
02:57So he's a very capable man serving the nation very faithfully across the board.
03:02And I think he served as the ambassador to the United States at one point.
03:07But the problem is, at the domestic political level, he's in a very precarious situation.
03:11He recently vetoed six laws proposed by the opposition party.
03:15And the opposition party initially threatened to impeach him again, and then sort of they
03:20walked back on this threat.
03:23But moving forward, I think he's going to be in very precarious waters.
03:27And as capable as he is, he's not a career politician, and he's more of a career technocrat.
03:35So he's going to have very limited bandwidth in terms of doing anything drastic.