Over a million South Koreans sign petition to impeach president Yoon Suk Yeol
More than one million people have signed a petition calling for the impeachment of South Korea’s president Yoon Suk Yeol.
The National Assembly’s website experienced delays and temporarily crashed after hundreds of thousands of people visited it to sign the petition earlier this week.
The petition, which went live on 20 June, urges the parliament to impeach Mr Yoon for alleged corruption, stoking war with North Korea and failing to stop the release of radioactive waste from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant.
The petition surpassed a million signatures on Wednesday, Korea Times reported, with a daily average of 100,000 signatures over a period of 10 days.
It is backed by the opposition Democratic Party of Korea, which said that the huge turnout reflected the public’s unfavourable view of Mr Yoon.
"The president must change first for the state affairs, now on the verge of a catastrophe, to get back on track," the party’s floor leader Park Chan-dae said.
South Korea’s laws require the parliament to assign any petition that draws more than 50,000 signatures from the public to a committee, which must then decide whether to put it up for a vote.
The president’s office has accused the opposition of playing dirty tricks. "The DPK should immediately stop anti-civilisational attempts to destroy the constitution and its unheard-of legislative violence and coup d’etat," a senior presidential official told Yonhap News Agency.
Political analysts have said the petition reflects anger and dissatisfaction with the president and that it could translate into mass protests if the parliamentary committee doesn’t put the petition up for a vote.
South Korea’s parliament has impeached two presidents, Roh Moo-hyun in 2004 and Park Geun-hye in 2017.
Mr Yoon, leader of the conservative People Power Party, became president in May 2022 after a narrow victory over Lee Jae-myung of the liberal Democratic Party.
His presidency has been beset by low popularity, with approval ratings lingering near 25 per cent since April.
Mr Yoon’s party faced a crushing defeat in April’s parliamentary election, widely perceived as a midterm confidence vote on the president.
Mr Yoon’s approval ratings dropped after he vetoed a bill seeking an investigation against first lady Kim Keon-Hee over the Dior bag controversy. He also obstructed another bill to investigate allegations that the president’s office interfered in a probe into the drowning of a marine corporal during a flood rescue mission last year.
