South Korea's President Park Geun-hye was officially removed from office Friday after the Constitutional Court affirmed her impeachment by the national assembly. It's a remarkable outcome for a relatively new democracy, and the scandal holds some important lessons for how impeachment can take place in a political culture deeply dominated by partisanship.
Park's removal depended on three key elements: peaceful, sustained popular protests; a corruption scandal so egregious that even politicians from Park's party were forced to admit it merited impeachment; and an orderly constitutional process for removal that was followed to the letter. These elements arguably form a kind of blueprint for presidential removal, a process pretty similar to the one followed by Brazil in the impeachment and removal of President Dilma Rousseff in 2015-16.
It's important to note that South Korea isn't a natural political environment for impeachment, because its politics are divided between two main parties: Park's center-right Liberty Korea Party is opposed by the center-left Together Democratic Party. Both are descendants of earlier parties that go back to the period of democratization in the 1980s. Including Park herself, there have been six presidents since the declaration of the Sixth Republic, a useful shorthand for the onset of democracy. Of those, three were left-ish and three right-ish. A system that features just two major parties makes removal difficult, because no party likes to see its own president removed from office.
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