The president of the Republic of Korea, also known as the president of Korea, is both the head of state and head of government of the Republic of Korea. The president is elected by citizens of the Republic of Korea and pledges to execute the duties of their office, chief among others "to defend the State, pursue peaceful unification of the homeland." The president leads the State Council, is the chief of the executive branch of the national government and the commander-in-chief of the Republic of Korea Armed Forces.
The National Intelligence Service is the chief intelligence agency of South Korea. The agency was officially established in 1961 as the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, during the rule of general Park Chung Hee’s military Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, which displaced the Second Republic of Korea. The original duties of the KCIA were to supervise and coordinate both international and domestic intelligence activities and criminal investigations by all government intelligence agencies, including that of the military. The agency’s broad powers allowed it to actively intervene in politics. Agents undergo years of training and checks before they are officially inducted and receive their first assignments.
Park Geun-hye is a South Korean politician who served as the 11th president of South Korea from 2013 to 2017. Park was the first woman to be elected president of South Korea, and also the first female president popularly elected as head of state in East Asia. She was also the first South Korean president to be born after the founding of South Korea. Her father, Park Chung Hee, was president from 1963 to 1979, serving five consecutive terms after he seized power in 1961.
Presidential elections were held in South Korea on 19 December 2012. They were the sixth presidential elections since democratization and the establishment of the Sixth Republic, and were held under a first-past-the-post system, in which there was a single round of voting and the candidate receiving the highest number of votes was elected. Under the South Korean constitution, a president is restricted to a single five-year term in office. The term of the then incumbent president Lee Myung-bak ended on 24 February 2013. According to the Korea Times, 30.7 million people voted with turnout at 75.8%. Park Geun-hye of the Saenuri party was elected the first female South Korean president with 51.6% of the vote opposed to 48.0% for her opponent Moon Jae-in. Park's share of the vote was the highest won by any candidate since the beginning of free and fair direct elections in 1987 and the first such election in which any candidate won a majority. Moreover, as of the 2022 election, this is the latest South Korean presidential election in which the winning candidate won an absolute majority of the vote.
The South Korean illegal surveillance incident was alleged to have occurred in 2010 when the Civil Service Ethics Division (공직윤리지원관실) under the Prime Minister's Office of South Korea inspected a civilian, a political action that is illegal under the South Korean conventions. The incident re-emerged in early 2012 as the election approached.
Yoon Chang-jung is a South Korean journalist and official. He briefly served as the press spokesman for Korean president Park Geun-hye in early 2013, and was fired following a sexual assault on a Korean American female intern at the South Korean Embassy in the U.S. in May 2013. This event is said to "have overshadowed President Park's first visit to the US".
Won Sei-hoon is a former South Korean public servant. Born in Yeongju, he obtained a Masters in Urban Administration from Hanyang University. In 2009, he was appointed the 10th Director of the National Intelligence Service. He was indicted in June 2013 for attempted interference in the 2012 South Korean presidential election by allegedly ordering an online misinformation campaign against opposition candidates. On January 22, 2014, he was found guilty for graft. He got a 2-year jail term and a fine of some 160 million won. In 2015, the Supreme Court returned to a lower court this ruling. On August 30, 2017, he was sentenced to four years in prison by the Seoul High Court.
Byun Hee-jae is a South Korean conservative political commentator. He is also one of the founder of conservative weekly newspaper name Mediawatch.
In August 2013, South Korea's spy agency, the National Intelligence Service (NIS), accused Lee Seok-ki, a lawmaker from the leftist Unified Progressive Party (UPP), of plotting to overthrow the country's government if war broke out with North Korea. He was alleged by NIS to have led a secret meeting in May 2013 of 130 members of his party aimed at attacking South Korean infrastructure if the heightened tensions between Koreas in the spring of 2013 had led to war.
Hwang Kyo-ahn is a South Korean politician and prosecutor who served as acting president of South Korea from 9 December 2016 to 10 May 2017 and the 44th prime minister of South Korea from 18 June 2015 to 11 May 2017.
Choi Soon-sil is a South Korean businesswoman known primarily for her involvement in the 2016 South Korean political scandal, stemming from her influence over the 11th President of South Korea, Park Geun-hye. In 2018, a court sentenced Choi to 20 years in prison on corruption charges. Due to Choi's concurrent involvement in her father's religious cult, reporting media have called her "South Korea's Rasputin", in reference to Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin.
The 2016 South Korean political scandal, often called Park Geun-hye–Choi Soon-sil Gate in South Korea, was a scandal that emerged around October 2016 in relation to the unusual access that Choi Soon-sil, the daughter of shaman-esque cult leader Choi Tae-min, had to President Park Geun-hye of South Korea.
On 9 December 2016, Park Geun-hye, the president of South Korea, was impeached as the culmination of a political scandal involving interventions to the presidency from her aide, Choi Soon-sil. 234 members of the 300-member National Assembly voted to impeach and temporarily suspend Park's presidential powers and duties. This exceeded the required two-thirds threshold in the National Assembly and, although the vote was by secret ballot, the results indicated that more than half of the 128 lawmakers in Park's party Saenuri had supported her impeachment. Thus, Hwang Kyo-ahn, then Prime Minister of South Korea, became acting president while the Constitutional Court of Korea was due to determine whether to accept the impeachment. The court upheld the impeachment in a unanimous 8–0 decision on 10 March 2017, removing Park from office. The regularly scheduled presidential election was advanced to 9 May 2017, and Moon Jae-in, former leader of the Democratic Party, was elected as Park's permanent successor.
Cho Yoon-sun is a South Korean lawyer, writer and politician. She formerly served as the South Korean Minister of Gender Equality and Family and later as its Minister of Culture. However, she was later jailed after being convicted of abuse of power and coercion.
Yoon Suk Yeol is a South Korean politician and attorney who has served as the 13th president of South Korea since 2022. A member of the People Power Party (PPP), Yoon previously served as the prosecutor general of South Korea from 2019 to 2021 under his presidential predecessor, Moon Jae-in. Since 14 December 2024, Yoon has been suspended from his presidential powers following his impeachment by the National Assembly of Korea. The Constitutional Court of Korea is in the process of determining whether he is permanently removed or restored to office.
Presidential elections were held in South Korea on 9 March 2022. Under the South Korean constitution, presidents are restricted to a single five-year term, meaning that incumbent president Moon Jae-in was ineligible to run for a second term. Opposition candidate Yoon Suk Yeol of the People Power Party won the election, defeating candidate Lee Jae-myung of the incumbent Democratic Party.
The 2021 South Korean by-elections were held in South Korea on 7 April 2021. The National Election Commission announced on 2 March 2021, that the by-elections would be held for 21 public offices or electoral districts, including 2 Metropolitan mayors, 2 Municipal mayors, 8 Metropolitan Council constituencies, and 9 Municipal Council constituencies. Candidate registration ran from 18 to 19 March, and the list of candidates was confirmed on 26 March.
Han Dong-hoon is a South Korean politician and prosecutor who served as the leader of People Power Party from July to December 2024. He previously served as the 69th Minister of Justice from May 2022 to December 2023 under the cabinet of Yoon Suk Yeol.
On 3 December 2024, at 22:27 Korea Standard Time (KST), Yoon Suk Yeol, the president of South Korea, declared martial law during a televised address. In his declaration, Yoon accused the Democratic Party (DPK), which has a majority in the National Assembly, of conducting "anti-state activities" and collaborating with "North Korean communists" to destroy the country, thereby creating a "legislative dictatorship". The order prohibited political activities, including gatherings of the National Assembly and local legislatures, and suspended the free press. Separately, Yoon reportedly ordered the arrest of various political opponents, including the leaders of the DPK and his own People Power Party (PPP). This event was widely characterized by Korean politicians and news organizations, both international and domestic, as an attempted self-coup.
