President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, who declared martial law on Tuesday night, has served a term plagued with problems and scandals following his narrow electoral win in 2022.
Mr. Yoon, a former prosecutor, won the presidency with less than half the vote, by a margin of less than 1 percent — a result that was widely viewed as a condemnation of his progressive predecessor rather than an enthusiastic endorsement of Mr. Yoon. As a candidate and in office he has allied himself with a wave of anti-feminist sentiment.
In office, the president has been in a near-constant political standoff with the opposition, which controls Parliament, ever since, while his approval rating in polls has fallen sharply.
His call for martial law, which allows him to clamp down on media and political opponents, was the first such declaration in South Korea in decades, but was foreshadowed by some of his previous actions in office. Mr. Yoon, who is seen in South Korea as a deeply divisive leader, accused the opposition of plotting an “insurgency” and “trying to overthrow the free democracy.”
Since his election, Mr. Yoon has used lawsuits, state regulators and criminal investigations to clamp down on speech that he called disinformation, efforts that were largely aimed at news organizations. The police and prosecutors repeatedly raided the homes and newsrooms of journalists whom his office has accused of spreading “fake news.”
Mr. Yoon has also been accused of using his power to advance his own interests. He was accused this year of pressuring the Defense Ministry to whitewash an investigation into the death of a South Korean marine in 2023, and vetoed a bill pushed through Parliament by the opposition calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the claim.
Mr. Yoon’s wife, Kim Keon Hee, has also been at the center of some of his troubles. Late last year, spy cam footage emerged showing Ms. Kim accepting a $2,200 Dior pouch as a gift. The incident roiled his political party and became a significant issue ahead of parliamentary elections.
Ms. Kim had also faced allegations that she was involved in a stock price manipulation scheme before Mr. Yoon’s election. Last year, the opposition-controlled Parliament passed a bill that would have mandated a special prosecutor to investigate the claims. Mr. Yoon vetoed the bill.
Notably, relations with North Korea have sunk to longtime lows since Mr. Yoon took office. For decades, the two Koreas — which never signed a peace treaty after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce — have swung between conciliatory tones and saber rattling. North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has been unpredictable and bellicose, developing nuclear weapons and supplying Russia with munitions and troops for its war against Ukraine.
Mr. Yoon has adopted a confrontational approach and called for spreading the idea of freedom to the North to penetrate the information blackout there. He has also expanded joint military drills with the United States and Japan.
North Korea, under Mr. Kim, has veered toward a more hawkish stance, shutting off all dialogue with Seoul and Washington, doubling down on testing nuclear-capable missiles and vowing to treat South Korea not as a partner for reunification but as an enemy that the North must annex should war break out.
Early on Wednesday morning, the National Assembly voted to lift martial law in a swift rebuke of the president’s drastic response to the political deadlock that had hobbled his tenure. The South Korean act on martial law states that if the assembly demands an end to it, the president must lift it “without delay.”
It was not immediately clear how the president or military would respond to the vote.
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