A governing party walkout deprived the opposition of the votes needed to remove the president.
An initiative to impeach South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has failed as National Assembly Speaker Woo Won-shik closed the session, which had stalled for hours after legislators from the governing party boycotted the vote.
Nearly all 108 members of Yoon’s People Power Party (PPP) walked out of the chamber before the vote on Saturday, prompting angry reactions from opposition legislators, with some accusing them of being “accomplices to insurrection”.
Derailing the impeachment’
The impeachment motion by the opposition required a two-thirds majority. Opposition parties control 192 of the legislature’s 300 seats, meaning they needed at least eight additional votes from Yoon’s People Power Party (PPP).
“So far this vote seems to be derailing the impeachment process,” Al Jazeera’s Rob McBride reported earlier on Saturday from Seoul, adding that only one member of the governing party had remained in the Chamber during the vote.
Speaker Woo stopped short of calling the result, appealing to PPP legislators to return “to protect the Republic of Korea and its democracy”.
The chair of the PPP, Han Dong-hoon, had called for Yoon’s removal on Friday, but the party remained formally opposed to impeachment.
Han said he had received intelligence that during the brief period of martial law, Yoon ordered the country’s defence counterintelligence commander to arrest and detain unspecified key politicians based on accusations of “antistate activities”.
The vote took place as tens of thousands of people packed streets near the National Assembly, waving banners, shouting slogans, dancing and singing along to K-pop songs with lyrics changed to call for Yoon’s removal. The president shocked the nation on Tuesday night when he announced martial law, giving the military sweeping emergency powers to combat unspecified threats from “North Korean communist forces” and “eradicate the shameless pro-North antistate forces”.
In the early morning hours on Wednesday, legislators voted 190-0 to nullify Yoon’s declaration and demonstrators poured onto the streets before Yoon said he would lift martial law.
Six opposition parties later filed an impeachment motion against Yoon. Opposition legislators also filed separate complaints of “insurrection” against the president, his defence and interior ministers and key military and police officers.