He is an authoritarian who brooks no disagreement from anyone, even those in his own party.
By edict, not law, President Yoon has placed the police under the control of the Ministry of Interior and Public Safety, an arrangement that was abandoned by law after the Chun Doo-hwan dictatorship. He has total control of the system of law enforcement and police power as a dictator has at present. He has had the current leader of the democratic party indicted on dubious charges. Under his direction, well over a hundred warrants have been issued against Lee Jae-myung's wife's public and private connections, as well, on trumped up accusations of financial misconduct.
Yoon and his cronies have totally politicized the administration of justice in South Korea. Those political rivals who oppose him, and their family members are booked on fabricated or trivial charges and vilified in the conservative media. Yoon's family members and his cronies are effectively immune from prosecution by contrast. Yoon's next move is, again by executive edict, to nullify the limitation of prosecutorial powers enacted in law earlier this year to reverse this process which he set in motion while he was still the prosecutor general during the Moon administration. He has placed former prosecutors personally loyal to him in charge of most government agencies. These people generally, have little or no political experience or relevant governing expertise. Their main qualification is slavish loyalty to their leader. Consequently, South Korea is being governed incompetently, and is blindly following Yoon's personal ideological imperatives such as McCarthyism and Milton Friedman economics.
For people who think he is good on foreign policy or national defense, they are being misled by his superficial obsequious posture toward the US and Japan, because it resembles an adherence to cold war era expectations, that are out of touch with political and economic reality, in South Korea. South Korea politically is virtually at war at the present time, and this situation is ignored in English language media. The situation in South Korea, including command and control of the military, the security situation, and domestic stability is in jeopardy because of Yoon's personal egotism, inability to compromise, and his profound belief that he is above the law. Meanwhile, the US and Japan (and Singapore apparently) think the situation is improving. Few leaders in the "democratic world" are more unpopular right now than Yoon Seok-yeol.
The calculation by the majority opposition party, the democratic party, is whether they can gather, through a special prosecution process enough evidence to impeach him, within a year.
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