By Joyce Zhou, Minwoo Park and Eduardo Baptista
SEOUL (Reuters) – As impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol fights for his political survival, the embattled chief has discovered an ally amongst younger conservative males.
Park Byeong-heon, 25, was a crowd favorite at a pro-Yoon rally on Sunday, cheered on as he gave a 10-minute speech in English geared toward international media, decrying makes an attempt by authorities to arrest Yoon over his bid to impose martial legislation final month.
“This is the country that we love. We have to protect it,” Park, a college pupil, informed Reuters after giving his speech.
“The elderly people (at the rallies) always say to me ‘actually, if we die, that’s it, it’s you young people that are in trouble’. This is in fact what motivated me to participate in more of these rallies these past few days.”
Whereas the majority of pro-Yoon protesters look like made up of retirees, younger conservative males like Park have performed a visual position in rallying help for the remoted Yoon.
Well-liked pro-Yoon YouTubers, a few of them conservative males of their 30s, have used their on-line attain to mobilise help and assert unsubstantiated claims that South Korean elections had been marred by fraud, echoing certainly one of Yoon’s justifications for briefly imposing martial legislation on Dec. 3.
Their activism has been inspired by Yoon, who informed supporters in a letter final Wednesday that he was “watching on YouTube live all the hard work” they had been doing.
A columnist for the conservative-leaning JoongAng Ilbo newspaper stated final month that Yoon’s “YouTube addiction” had triggered him to fall “into a world of delusion dominated by conspiracy theories”.
Park doesn’t view it this fashion.
“I watched videos of YouTubers spreading the truth and I actually researched a lot of material. I realised that all the South Korean media were lying, and that made my heart boil with anger,” stated Park.
Park pointed to a declare by pro-Yoon YouTuber Kim Sung-won, who has additionally coated the current rallies, that very like the 2020 election that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump claimed was fraudulent, South Korea confronted the identical threat.
Many protesters on the rally Park attended had been seen holding a banner with the “Stop the Steal” slogan popularised by Trump supporters following his loss to U.S. President Joe Biden.
Yoon’s supporters have adopted the slogan within the hope that Trump would act or converse in help of his South Korean counterpart quickly after his inauguration on Jan. 20.
Teams of younger males had been amongst a crowd of round 100 supporters that stayed up all evening close to Yoon’s residence on Friday, vowing to dam South Korean investigators attempting to hold out a warrant to arrest the impeached president.
One in every of these males, YouTuber Bae In-kyu, who calls himself an “anti-feminist”, a label the president has additionally embraced, filmed himself being greeted by Yoon Sang-hyeon, a lawmaker from the ruling conservative Folks Energy Social gathering and a vocal opponent of the president’s impeachment.
One in every of Bae’s movies defending Yoon’s determination to impose martial legislation on the grounds there have been respectable issues about election fraud has racked over 1 million views.
South Korean males of their twenties accounted for 63% of voters that backed Yoon within the 2022 presidential election that he received by simply 0.73 %, in comparison with 26% of girls of the identical age.
The 2024 U.S. Presidential election additionally noticed an analogous rightward shift amongst younger males, with 56% of males aged 18-29 voting for Trump final 12 months, in contrast with 41% in 2020.
South Korea’s earlier centre-left authorities beneath then president Moon Jae-in had vowed to deal with gender inequalities within the nation of 52 million. South Korea has the worst gender pay hole within the OECD and its ladies’s labour market participation charge is under the OECD common.
This effort, nevertheless, led to a backlash amongst South Korean males, as perceptions of reverse discrimination elevated, together with disgruntlement on the obligatory navy service of younger males, in accordance with an October 2024 article by Soohyun Christine Lee, a senior lecturer at King’s School London.
