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(Hanahoe), whose members had been highly involved in the authoritarian past, and
expanded democratic elections to all levels of government. In 1997, South Korea
became the first East Asian democracy in which power was peacefully transferred
to an opposition leader, Kim Dae-jung. The Kim Dae-jung government (1998–2002)

advanced civil and political rights despite the 1997 financial crisis. Assessing
the democratic progress of the 1990s, Kim Byung-Kook (2000, 53) wrote that
“electoral politics has become the only possible political game in town.”

In the second phase, the early and middle 2000s, South Korean democracy

persisted as political representation was enlarged to include various ideological
parties such as the Democratic Labour Party, whose principles were close to
socialism and, thus, had been prohibited under the authoritarian past. After 10 years

of the progressive governments of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, a traditional
conservative party, the Grand National Party, returned to power through the 2007
national election, which suggested that South Korean democracy had passed
Huntington’s two-turnover test of democratic consolidation (1991, 267). On the
basis of the enlargement of ideological representation and the passing of the two-

turnover test, Ham Chaebong (2008, 129) declared that “South Korea’s democracy
is consolidated in the maximalist sense.”

However, South Korea experienced democratic deconsolidation before the

candlelight protest of 2016–2017. Lee Myung-bak was elected president from the
conservative side in 2007 and Park Geun-hye succeeded him in 2012; their actions
while in office indicated that South Korean democracy had waned. For example,
freedom of expression and association were restricted and the Korean National

Intelligence Service illegally interfered in the 2012 presidential election by
manipulating public opinion online (Cho and Kim 2016). It was also revealed during
the early period of the candlelight protest that the Park Geun-hye government had
blacklisted about 10,000 artists critical of her presidency (Shin 2018).

However, the candlelight protest became a turning point, after which Korean
democracy was restored, as evidenced in Figure 23.1. During late 2016, Korean
mass media discovered that Park Geun-hye had allowed Choi Soon-sil, her personal
confidante, who held no government position, to freely meddle in domestic and

foreign policies, actions collectively called the “Park Geun-hye and Choi Soon-sil การอภิปราย
scandal.” The candlelight protest escalated during November 2016 when political