Unlikely white knight brought conservatives back to power

President Moon Jae-in, left, walks beside then-prosecutor general Yoon Suk-yeol in the Blue House on July 25, 2019. Yoon was elected president on Thursday. [YONHAP]

Former prosecutor general Yoon Suk-yeol was an unlikely figure to lead the conservative People Power Party (PPP) back to power just five years after the impeachment of the party's last president, Park Geun-hye.

After all, it was Yoon himself who led the investigation of Park that led to her removal from office — and the PPP's banishment to the political wilderness.

Once reviled by conservatives for leading corruption probes against not only Park but also former president Lee Myung-bak, the heads of Samsung and Hyundai and a chief justice of the Supreme Court, Yoon's willingness to go after President Moon Jae-in's political allies just a few years later — and his front-page power struggles with key figures in the Moon administration — transformed him virtually overnight into the great right-wing hope.

Come May, the former prosecutor general will move into the Blue House, riding an electoral shift driven by dissatisfaction with the Moon administration's failure to curb runaway real estate prices, widening socioeconomic inequality, corruption tied to land development — and with its battle with Yoon and his entire prosecutorial agency, which was seen as arrogant, ruthless and petty all at the same time.

While Yoon is not the first president to have made his name by facing down his predecessors, his path to the Blue House was undeniably unusual.

Yoon was born on Dec. 18, 1960 in Seoul. He hails from a family of academics. His father, Yoon Ki-jung, is a retired Yonsei University professor who established the Korean Statistical Society and is now a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His mother, Choi Jeong-ja, was a lecturer in at Ewha Womans University before leaving the position after getting married.

After graduating from Chungam High School in 1979, Yoon studied law at Seoul National University. He passed only the first part of the bar in his fourth year, and failed the notoriously difficult second portion nine times — a setback that made him older than his peers at the Judicial Research and Training Institute once he passed the bar in 1991.

Yoon made up for lost time by building a reputation as an independent-minded public prosecutor with little regard for partisan allegiances or political backers of his targets.

After successfully prosecuting the National Police Agency's intelligence chief Park Hee-won for bribery in 1999, Yoon scored a one-year jail sentence in 2004 for Ahn Hee-jung, a former aide to President Roh Moo-hyun and later governor of South Chungcheong, on charges of taking illegal campaign donations from businessmen.

He put Hyundai Chairman Chung Mong-koo behind bars for bribery and breach of fiduciary duty in 2007, and won a conviction in 2013 for Lee Sang-deuk, brother of former president Lee Myung-bak, for accepting illegal slush funds.

Yoon's entry into the national spotlight, however, came when he investigated allegations that the National Intelligence Service attempted to manipulate public opinion through comments on online articles and social media supporting conservative presidential candidate Park Geun-hye in the 2012 election.

"I don't owe my loyalty to anyone," Yoon famously said during a National Assembly hearing in 2013, when he exposed pressure from Park's Justice Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn to not go after the spy agency.

The probe into the NIS came at a cost: Yoon was transferred in 2014 to the Daegu District Prosecutors' Office, a common destination for prosecutors deemed meddlesome by politicians. It was effectively exile from the prestigious Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office, which often handles politically sensitive cases.

However, Yoon was recalled to the Seoul branch to work on the investigation of President Park over allegations of a corrupting influence by her confidante Choi Soon-sil, the scandal that led to Park's downfall.

He also led the probe into Samsung heir Lee Jae-yong paying money to foundations controlled by Choi and implicitly asking the president to use her power to enable his smooth succession as the head of the conglomerate — an investigation that led to a two-year jail sentence for Lee, for which he was paroled in August.

Yoon's status as a fearless defender of the public interest — and in the eyes of his conservative critics, a political lackey — was cemented when he was appointed chief of the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office when Moon came to power in May 2017, and as Prosecutor General in June 2019.

Ironically for Moon and key figures in his administration, it was from this position that Yoon's star began to rise — at the expense of their own, and the reputation of liberals as a whole.

Yoon's conflict with the president began with his decision to initiate a probe into Cho Kuk, Moon's selection for justice minister, and allegations that the nominee and his wife fabricated academic credentials for their daughter, which she used to successfully apply to Korea University and Pusan University's graduate medical school.

Cho was forced to resign as justice minister just 35 days after his appointment, a downfall that triggered a spiral of increasing animosity between Yoon and the ruling Democratic Party (DP).

Over the course of the following year, Yoon faced an increasingly bitter power struggle with Cho's successor, Choo Mi-ae, who made clear she would rein in what the ruling party increasingly cast as a politicized and overreaching state prosecution service.

Shortly after her appointment in January 2020, Choo abruptly reassigned prosecutors investigating abuse of power and corruption allegations involving key members of the Moon administration and effectively demoted Yoon's closest aides. Then she attempted to suspend Yoon from his position twice in November and December 2020, leading him to overturn both administrative orders through legal challenges.

Tensions between the embattled prosecutor general and the Moon administration further escalated as the president and the DP pushed a series of aggressive measures to weaken the prosecution's powers. Yoon became a star among conservatives who once blamed him for imprisoning former presidents Park and Lee, who were convicted in April and October 2018 in separate corruption cases.

He was also nothing less than a martyr to prosecutors who saw him as defending the service's powers to investigate high and low officials alike.

Yoon finally broke with the president who appointed him last March, resigning from his post when the ruling party announced a plan to launch a so-called Serious Crimes Investigative Agency under the Ministry of Justice, which would strip the state prosecution service's authority to investigate corruption, among five other crimes, and give that power to the new agency.

Having built his brand as a warrior against Moon's administration, the prospect of Yoon joining the opposition party to run on its presidential ticket became not a question of if, but when.

However, his entry into the PPP as an outsider was not without friction, particularly with its newly-elected leader, 36 year-old Lee Jun-seok.

Early last summer, as Yoon was preparing his own team of supporters drawn from the academic and political sectors to look into the viability of a Blue House bid, Lee urged the would-be presidential hopeful to join without delay.

In a widely circulated comment made in a June radio interview, Lee said the party's campaign "bus" would "depart in August without exceptions," implying Yoon would not receive special treatment as a contender for the party's presidential ticket.

Even after Yoon joined the PPP in late July and won the party's primary over longtime PPP establishment figures, such as former presidential candidate Hong Joon-pyo and Jeju Governor Won Hee-ryong, Lee and Yoon continued to feud, almost publicly, over Yoon's campaign appointments and responses to various controversies involving Yoon's wife, eventually leading to the party leader's temporary withdrawal from campaign activities in the winter.

Yoon also alienated Kim Chong-in, known as a kingmaker in Korean electoral politics, over the campaign's direction, pushing Kim to resign as campaign chief after a few weeks in the post.

Yoon's campaign eventually came back together after he reconciled with Lee, but only after weeks of polls showing him losing ground to DP rival Lee Jae-myung.

Now that he has won the election, it remains to be seen whether Yoon will continue seeking his own path within the PPP.

In a victory speech early Thursday, Yoon urged his supporters to "join our forces together for the people and the nation," suggesting the former political outsider may have embraced the conservatives' cause as his own.

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]