BBC:
On a cold January afternoon, a young pharmacy student, Shin Jeong-min, waited restlessly outside South Korea’s Constitutional Court, as the country’s suspended president arrived to fight his impeachment.
While Yoon Suk Yeol testified, she chanted along with hundreds of his incensed and worried supporters, who have rallied around him ever since his failed attempt to impose martial law. “Release him now. Cancel his impeachment,” they shouted.
“If the president is impeached and the opposition leader is elected, our country will become one with North Korea and Kim Jong Un,” Jeong-min said, citing a theory popular among President Yoon’s most fanatical followers: that the left-leaning opposition party wants to unify with the North and turn South Korea into a communist country.
At 22 years old, Jeong-min stands out from the legion of elderly Koreans who have always feared and despised the North, and make up the bulk of those who hold these far-right conspiratorial beliefs.
That generation of Koreans, now in its 60s and 70s, lived through the Cold War and remembers bitterly the devastating aftermath of North Korea’s invasion in the 1950s.
When Yoon declared martial law in early December, he played on these fears to justify his power grab.
Without citing evidence, he claimed that “North Korean communist forces” had infiltrated the opposition party and were trying to overthrow the country. They needed to be “eradicated”, he said, as he moved swiftly to ban political activity and put the army in charge.
Two months on from his failed coup, an anti-communist frenzy is gripping Yoon’s supporters, young and old.
Even some who had never given North Korea or communism much thought are now convinced their dynamic democracy is on the brink of being turned into a leftist dictatorship – and that their leader had no choice but to remove people’s democratic rights in order to protect them from both Pyongyang and Beijing.
