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 leader has found an ally among young conservatives.
Park Byeong-heon, 25, was a crowd favorite at a pro-Yoon rally on Sunday, cheered as he delivered a 10-minute speech in English to foreign media, denouncing attempts by authorities to arrest Yoon over his push to impose martial law last year. month.
“This is the country we love. We have to protect it,” Park, a student, told Reuters after the speech.
“Older people (at rallies) always tell me ‘actually, if we die, that’s it, you young people are in trouble’. That’s actually what motivated me to participate in more rallies like this these last few days.”
While most of the protesters supporting Yoon appear to be retirees, young conservatives like Park have played a visible role in rallying support for the isolated Yoon.
Popular pro-Yoon YouTubers, some of them conservative men in their 30s, have used their online reach to mobilize support and make baseless claims that the South Korean election was marred by fraud, echoing one of Yoon’s justifications for the short-lived state of emergency on Dec. 3.
Their activism was encouraged by Yoon, who told supporters in a letter last Wednesday that he “watches all the hard work” they do live on YouTube.
A columnist for the conservative-leaning newspaper JoongAng Ilbo said last month that Yoon’s “YouTube addiction” had caused him to fall “into a world of deception dominated by conspiracy theories.”
Park doesn’t see it that way.
“I watched videos of YouTubers spreading the truth and actually researched a lot of material. I realized that all the South Korean media is lying, and that made my heart boil with anger,” Park said.
Park pointed to a claim by pro-Yoon YouTuber Kim Sung-won, who has also followed the recent rallies, that like the 2020 election that US President-elect Donald Trump claimed was rigged, South Korea faced the same risk.
Many of the protesters at the rally Park attended were seen holding a “Stop the Steal” banner popularized by Trump supporters after his defeat by US President Joe Biden.
Yoon’s supporters adopted the slogan in hopes that Trump would act or speak in support of his South Korean counterpart shortly after his inauguration on January 20.
Groups of young men were among a crowd of about 100 supporters who stayed up all night near Yoon’s residence on Friday, vowing to thwart South Korean investigators trying to execute an arrest warrant for the impeached president.
One of those men, YouTuber Bae In-kyu, who calls himself an “anti-feminist,” a label the president has embraced, filmed himself being greeted by Yoon Sang-hyeon, a lawmaker from the ruling conservative People Power Party and a vocal opponent of the president’s impeachment.
One of Bae’s videos defending Yoon’s decision to impose martial law based on legitimate concerns about election fraud has garnered more than a million views.
South Korean men in their twenties made up 63% of voters who supported Yoon in the 2022 presidential election, which he won by just 0.73 percent, compared to 26% of women of the same age.
The 2024 US presidential election also saw a similar shift to the right among young men, with 56% of men aged 18-29 voting for Trump last year, compared to 41% in 2020.
South Korea’s previous center-left government under then-President Moon Jae-in promised to tackle gender inequality in the country of 52 million. South Korea has the largest gender pay gap in the OECD, and its female labor force participation rate is below the OECD average.
The effort, however, led to a backlash among South Korean men, as perceptions of reverse discrimination increased, including dissatisfaction with mandatory military service for young men, according to an October 2024 article by Soohyun Christine Lee, a senior lecturer at King’s College London.
