by a landslide last April<\/a>, some of these channels claimed that Yoon was a victim of electoral interference led by China, and that North Korea sympathisers lurking among the opposition were behind the ruling party’s defeat. Similar claims were echoed by Yoon when he tried to justify his short-lived martial law declaration.<\/p>\nThese narratives have found resonance in an online audience that harbours a general distrust of mainstream media and worries about South Korea’s neighbours.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Getty Images<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\nWhen Yoon’s supporters gathered outside his residence in January to block his arrest, scenes of confrontation with the police were live streamed to YouTube<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n\n
“I think [the election was] totally fraudulent, because when you vote, you fold the paper, but they kept finding papers that were not folded,” Kim, who gave only his surname, told the BBC at a pro-Yoon rally in January. Claims like these have not waned despite a previous Supreme Court ruling that the voting slips were not manipulated.<\/p>\n
Kim, 28, is among a contingent of young men who have become the new faces of South Korea’s right-wing.<\/p>\n
Young Perspective, a YouTube channel with more than 800,000 subscribers run by someone who describes himself as “a young man who values freedom”, often shares clips from parliamentary sessions showing PPP politicians taking down opposition members.<\/p>\n
Another popular YouTuber is Jun Kwang-hoon, a pastor and founder of the evangelical Liberty Unification Party, who posts videos of politically loaded sermons urging his 200,000 subscribers to join pro-Yoon rallies. This is in line with the historically strong protestant support for conservatism in South Korea.<\/p>\n
Nam Hyun-joo, an employee at a theological school, told the BBC that she believed the Chinese Communist Party was “the main actor behind the election fraud”. Standing alone outside the Constitutional Court in the biting January cold, she held a protest sign denouncing the judiciary.<\/p>\n
Other voices dominating the virtual realm are a snapshot of the rest of Yoon’s support base: middle-aged or elderly men. One of them runs A Stroke of Genius, one of the largest pro-Yoon YouTube channels with 1.6 million subscribers. His livestreams of rallies and monologues pillorying Yoon’s opponents regularly rack up tens of thousands of views, with the comments section flooded with calls to “protect President Yoon”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
In the tumultuous months since Yoon’s martial law declaration, it appears that his party’s popularity has not suffered.<\/p>\n
In fact, quite the opposite: While the PPP’s approval ratings sank to 26.2% in the days after Yoon declared martial law, it rebounded to more than 40% just weeks later – much higher than before the chaos.<\/p>\n
Buoyed by the loyalty of his supporters, Yoon wrote in a letter to them in January that it was only after being impeached that he “felt like a president”.<\/p>\n
“Everyone’s kind of scratching their heads a bit here,” Michael Breen, a Seoul-based consultant and former journalist who covered the Koreas, tells the BBC. While conservatives in South Korea have been “very divided and feeble” over the last decade, he says, Yoon is “now more popular with them than he was before he tried to introduce martial law”.<\/p>\n
This solidarity has likely been fuelled by a shared dislike of the opposition, which has launched multiple attempts to impeach members of Yoon’s cabinet, pushed criminal investigations against Yoon and his wife, and used its parliamentary majority to impeach Yoon’s replacement Han Duck-soo.<\/p>\n
“I think the opposition party’s power in the assembly went to its head,” says Mr Breen. “Now they’ve shot themselves in the foot.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Natalie Thomas\/BBC<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n\n
An embattled Yoon has become larger than life, rebranded as a martyr who saw martial law as the only way to save South Korea’s democracy.<\/p>\n
“If it wasn’t for the good of the country, he wouldn’t have chosen martial law, where he would have to pay with his life if he failed,” a pro-Yoon rally attendee, who gave only his surname Park, told the BBC.<\/p>\n
This has also contributed to a widening chasm within the PPP. While some have joined pro-Yoon rallies, others crossed party lines to vote for Yoon’s impeachment.<\/p>\n
“Why are people worshipping him like a king? I can’t understand it,” said PPP lawmaker Cho Kyoung-tae, who supported Yoon’s impeachment.<\/p>\n
Kim Sang-wook, another PPP lawmaker who has emerged as a prominent anti-Yoon voice among conservatives, said he was pressured to leave the party after supporting Yoon’s impeachment. And now YouTubers, according to Kim, have become the president’s public relations machine.<\/p>\n
Worries have simmered over an increasingly ungovernable group within the conservative movement. And as influential left-wing YouTubers similarly rally anti-Yoon protesters, there are also concerns that political differences are being driven ever deeper into the fabric of South Korea’s society.<\/p>\n
“Much damage has already been done in terms of radicalising the right, and the left as well for that matter,” US-based lawyer and Korea expert Christopher Jumin Lee told the BBC.<\/p>\n
He added that at this point “any compromise with a conservative party that continues to embrace Yoon will likely be seen as anathema”.<\/p>\n
“By driving his insurrection attempt into the centre of Korean politics, Yoon has effectively executed a decade’s worth of polarisation.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Koh Ewe and Yuna Ku BBC News Reporting fromSingapore and Seoul Getty Images A pro-Yoon fringe movement, stoked by right-wing YouTubers, has become both more energised and extreme Pained cries rang out in front of former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s official residence on Friday, as judges of the Constitutional Court judges confirmed his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26433,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26432"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26434,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26432\/revisions\/26434"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.godj.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}