The leader of South Korea’s main opposition party thought the president’s late night martial law announcement was a deepfake when he first saw it, he told CNN on Thursday as his party now seeks to impeach the country’s leader.
President Yoon Suk Yeol announced the decree – which only lasted a few hours before being struck down by lawmakers who forced their way past soldiers into parliament – in an extraordinary late-night television address late Tuesday night
“That night, after I got off work, I was lying in bed with my wife in our home … when my wife suddenly showed me a YouTube video and said, ‘The president is declaring martial law,’” Lee Jae-myung, leader of the liberal Democratic Party (DP), told CNN.
“I replied, ‘That’s a deepfake. It has to be a deepfake. There’s no way that’s real,’” he said, referring to the term for fake audio and video created with artificial intelligence.
“But when I watched the video, the president was indeed declaring martial law – yet I thought to myself, ‘This is fabricated, it’s fake.’”
The news was especially stunning given South Korea has spent the last four decades shaping itself into a vibrant democracy with frequent protests and protected freedoms – a hard-won victory after a long history of bloody authoritarian rule.
In the last few days, after Yoon backed down and lifted the decree early Wednesday, protesters have demanded the president’s removal while opposition parties including the DP begin impeachment proceedings.
Lee, who was Yoon’s main rival in the 2022 presidential election and is himself embroiled in multiple legal difficulties after being indicted on criminal charges, has led the impeachment efforts.
On Tuesday night, within an hour of Yoon announcing martial law, Lee rushed to the parliament in Seoul – live-streaming as he climbed over a fence to enter the building as lawmakers scrambled to vote against the decree. The video has since gone viral, viewed tens of millions of times on the social platform X.
Parliament could vote on impeachment as soon as Saturday. If it reaches the two-thirds majority to pass, it will then go to one of the country’s highest courts for further approval.
However, Yoon’s ruling People Power Party is working to block the move.
Multiple members of Yoon’s party joined their political opponents in blocking the martial law decree during the remarkable late-night scenes inside parliament.
But party leader Han Dong-hoon said in a briefing Thursday he would oppose the impeachment because it could cause “unprepared chaos,” though he emphasized he was “not defending President Yoon’s unconstitutional martial law,”
Meanwhile, many lawmakers haven’t dared leave the parliament building – including opposition member Kang Sun-woo, who has been there since Tuesday night.
“We are concerned and afraid that President Yoon might make another declaration of martial law at any time … since the last martial law failed,” she told CNN on Thursday. “That’s why we are staying here and we’re not going home … We are sleeping, eating, and some colleagues are washing here at the National Assembly.”
Questions now swirl around the future of Yoon’s presidency, his party’s position in government, and how this could reshape the country’s political landscape of a major Asian economy and key US regional ally.
Lee, a human rights lawyer turned former provincial governor, only lost the 2022 election by a razor-thin margin – but neither candidate was particularly popular. Both men were mired in scandal, and have been dogged by legal cases and allegations in the years since.
Lee now faces several trials including for bribery and charges related to a $1 billion property development scandal, Reuters reported. In November, he was indicted for personal misuse of public funds, and separately convicted and sentenced for violating election law.
Lee has denied the charges and said he would appeal.
