154, July Aug 2025

At first sight, the six-month stand-off in South Korea between far-right and liberal-democratic forces earlier this year seemed to have much in common with such clashes elsewhere. Rising tensions that pitted the National Assembly, controlled by the liberal Democratic Party of Korea (dpk), against hardline conservative President Yoon Suk-yeol and his People Power Party (ppp), came to a head when Yoon declared martial law on 3 December 2024. In response, dpk legislators staged a dramatic midnight break-in to the National Assembly to reject the declaration. When right-wing demonstrators stormed the Seoul Western District Court in January 2025 to protest Yoon’s impeachment, the resulting destruction seemed like a rerun of the Capitol Hill occupation in 2021 or the trashing of the Senate in Brasília in 2023. Yoon’s supporters also brandished ‘Stop the Steal!’ placards and carried us and Israeli flags. Like Trump and Bolsonaro, Yoon has strong backing from evangelicals, and there were further parallels in the striking gender polarization in South Korea, with many young men backing the ‘anti-feminist’ far right while young women predominated in the liberal counter-mobilizations. Finally, the victory of the dpk’s Lee Jae-myung in the presidential election of 3 June 2025 could seem to echo Biden’s in November 2020 or Lula’s in December 2022; the centre left had returned to office, but the right was stronger and more energized than before.footnote¹

Nevertheless, there are important differences between the South Korean far right and its Western counterparts. Typically, it doesn’t trade in nativist attacks on immigrants nor populist denunciations of the political establishment. Rather than rejecting ‘globalism’, it regards the country’s alliance with the us as a cornerstone of its identity. Instead of emerging as an outside challenger to the mainstream, its origins lie in the authoritarian bloc that governed the country for forty years after World War Two, running it as a frontline us ally during the Cold War. Indeed, its roots can be traced still further back, to the strata that collaborated with the Imperial Japanese occupiers in the first half of the twentieth century. To explain how the far right has come to figure as such a significant force in South Korean politics requires grappling with this history.

In what follows, I trace this strain in South Korean politics to the country’s failed decolonization from Japanese rule and to the ‘revolution–restoration’ dynamic that characterized us intervention from August 1945, when the American occupation authorities constituted the cadre of the new polity south of the 38th Parallel on a hard-line anti-Communist basis. I then look at how this conservative bloc set about remaking itself after South Korea’s transition to democracy and the consolidation of a fragile liberal hegemony from 1998, examining the far right’s growing radicalization in the 2010s and 20s, as background to Yoon’s December 2024 declaration of martial law and the narrow win by the dpk candidate Lee Jae-myung in June 2025. What are the prospects for the new administration, given the country’s frayed relations with the North, its darkening economic outlook and the radicalization of far-right forces within the conservative bloc?

Hirohito’s surrender on 15 August 1945 brought an abrupt end to thirty-five years of Japanese colonial rule, preceded by decades of coercive encroachment. The colonial power had always been contested: popular peasant-soldier-scholar militias battled the well-equipped Japanese invasion force in the 1910s, exiled political groups militated for the country’s self-determination and, in 1919, the March First Movement organized declarations of independence across the country. But Japan also succeeded in dividing Korean society, building up a cohesive collaborator class of bureaucrats, industrialists, landowners, military and police on the one hand, who benefited from a degree of colonial infrastructural development, and the remainder of the population—workers, peasants, tenant farmers, anti-colonial activists—on the other.

With the Japanese Empire’s collapse in 1945, pent-up social tensions were unleashed across the peninsula. Local forms of self-organization, the People’s Committees, were loosely united in the People’s Republic of Korea, proclaimed by Lyuh Woon-hyung, an independence leader who aimed to work with both sides of the political spectrum. The prk’s programme called for the confiscation of land held by the Japanese and ‘national traitors’, the nationalization of major industries, labour protections, freedom of speech, assembly and faith, voting rights, the emancipation of women and a foreign policy based on cooperation with the us, the Soviet Union and China alike. Red Army forces reached Korea within ten days of Tokyo’s surrender, stopping just north of the 38th Parallel, as Stalin had agreed with his American allies. The Soviet authorities began working with the local organizations, backing communist-aligned Korean resistance fighters, Kim Il Sung first among them, to lead the Provisional People’s Committee for the northern region.footnote²

These nascent political structures and popular forces—including a wave of labour militancy that saw workers taking over the factories as Japanese bosses left—were a direct challenge to Washington’s ideas of post-war grand strategy. Reaching the peninsula in September 1945, the us Army Military Government in Korea (usamgik), led by General John Hodge, refused to recognize the People’s Republic of Korea and instead set about resuscitating the administrative and security structures of the Japanese colonial state. The usamgik retained 85 per cent of the Korean officers who had worked in the police force under the Japanese, many of whom were practised in torture and repression. It established a close partnership with the conservative Korean Democratic Party, which mostly consisted of collaborationist landlords, businessmen and bureaucrats. Those who contested this emerging settlement were persecuted, with many killed or imprisoned, to the extent that by the late 1940s the left had become largely inactive south of the 38th Parallel. Paramilitary organizations such as the Northwest Youth Association (Sŏbuk Ch’ŏngnyŏnhoe), largely made up of anti-communist refugees from the North, helped massacre up to 30,000 Jeju islanders in 1948, following popular protests there against the elections that were consolidating the division of the country into two adversarial polities: the Republic of Korea versus the Democratic People’s Republic. The septuagenarian Syngman Rhee, a us-based nationalist and violent anti-communist, was selected by Washington for election as the first ‘post-liberation’ leader in the us-occupied zone.footnote³

The Southern ruling bloc was further entrenched by the devastating impact of the Korean War, in which a million soldiers and over two million civilians died. Launched in 1950 by Kim Il Sung in a bid to oust the American occupiers and reunite the peninsula, it saw the Korean People’s Army sweep through the South, taking Seoul, before being driven back by a us–un offensive, reversed in turn by the entry of Chinese forces which helped the kpa re-take Seoul. Two years of grinding trench warfare, accompanied by non-stop us bombing of the North, resulted in stalemate and ultimately an armistice along the same 38th Parallel. In the South, the upshot was to shield the hard-right elements of the fascist era behind a virulently anti-North and anti-communist ideology, while legitimating the violent repression of any remaining political adversaries.