People protest during a candlelight vigil to condemn South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol's surprise declarations of the failed martial law and to call for his resignation in Seoul, South Korea, on Dec. 5.Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
The circumstances that prompted this week’s political crisis in South Korea are unique to South Korea. But forces at work there are at work elsewhere, including here.
Generation after generation of low birth rates has imposed great strains on the young, who in response are turning to conservative, and sometimes even anti-democratic, politicians.
In the United States, a majority of men under 30 voted for Republican candidate Donald Trump, despite the president-elect’s authoritarian leanings.
France is in crisis this week, after Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally helped bring down the government. And in South Korea, a conservative president attempted a coup.
Things will get worse. Fertility rates continue to fall around the world. Every generation of young people is smaller than the previous one. They are expected to work harder and earn less while financing the needs of the old.
Because there are fewer young people to drive the consumer economy, growth is weak and many younger workers struggle to make ends meet. Who can blame them for turning against the politicians who created this mess?
South Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world, a projected 0.68 in 2024, far less than the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a population. The country could lose two-thirds of its population by the end of this century.
“South Korea may become the first country to disappear from the face of the earth,” the Economic Times speculated.
China and Japan also have ultralow fertility rates and are losing population. Japan’s then-prime minister Fumio Kishida warned last year that his country is “on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions.”
Developed East Asian countries combine high levels of education among women with a strongly patriarchal culture. As a result, many women decide to focus on their career, which they would be expected to give up if they had children.
That decision breeds resentments. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol won a narrow election victory in 2022 in part with the support of angry young men who “have redirected their growing economic frustration by scapegoating women as the new out-group,” Rhys Moon wrote in the Harvard Political Review. “This growing anti-feminist movement is a dangerous rightward turn among young voters.”
President Yoon is an avowed anti-feminist, claiming that institutions and policies that promote equality for women aren’t needed, and that feminist attitudes are responsible for South Korea’s ultralow birth rate.
When parliamentary opposition frustrated his conservative agenda he tried, but failed, to impose martial law.
In his first term as American president, Mr. Trump placed judges on the Supreme Court who then overturned Roe v. Wade, which protected a woman’s right to an abortion. For his second term, he has nominated crackpots and misfits to run federal health services, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military.
His goal appears to be to completely restructure federal institutions – the Deep State, as he and his supporters call it – even if it means undermining those institutions, and democracy along with it. Undermining democracy may even be the intent.
Chinese women look to South Korean ‘K-girls’ for inspiration as declining birth rates spark backlash
One of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers is the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, a fervent pro-natalist who, along with vice president-elect JD Vance, supports the Hungarian approach of offering financial incentives to encourage couples to have more children.
Viktor Orban’s Hungary is the most extreme example of the far right’s authoritarian tendencies combined with natalist policies, but that anti-democratic, anti-feminist, pro-natalist agenda is on the march across Europe.
Efforts in Canada by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government to counter the impact of this country’s low fertility rate – we’re at 1.4 and falling – by increasing temporary and permanent immigration have had disastrous consequences, including housing shortages and strained health care systems. Opposition to immigration is growing, though it has yet to approach levels seen in other countries.
There is no reason to fear that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre harbours authoritarian, anti-immigrant or anti-feminist tendencies. His populist conservatism is mild by international comparison.
But Canadians would be foolish to believe that what is happening elsewhere – from Seoul to Washington to Paris to Budapest – could never happen here. No country is immune.