We will unite with Kim Jong Un': Conspiracies grip South Korea
On a cold January afternoon, a young pharmacy student, Shin Jeong-min, waited restlessly outside South Korea's Constitutional Court, as the country's suspended president arrived to fight his impeachment.
While Yoon Suk Yeol testified, she chanted along with hundreds of his incensed and worried supporters, who have rallied around him ever since his failed attempt to impose martial law. "Release him now. Cancel his impeachment," they shouted.
"If the president is impeached and the opposition leader is elected, our country will become one with North Korea and Kim Jong Un," Jeong-min said, citing a theory popular among President Yoon's most fanatical followers: that the left-leaning opposition party wants to unify with the North and turn South Korea into a communist counggrab.
At 22 years old, Jeong-min stands out from the legion of elderly Koreans who have always feared and despised the North, and make up the bulk of those who hold these far-right conspiratorial beliefs.That generation of Koreans, now in its 60s and 70s, lived through the Cold War and remembers bitterly the devastating aftermath of North Korea's invasion in the 1950s.
When Yoon declared martial law in early December, he played on these fears to justify his power grab.
