Virtue into Vice: How South Korea’s Yoon Suk-yeol Government Invoked Democracy to Demobilise the Labour Movement

This study examines why the conservative government in South Korea, led by President Yoon Suk-yeol (2022–2025), adopted demobilisation as a novel strategy of labour repression and how it was implemented. This strategy combined discursive campaigns that demoralised the labour movement with executive measures that undermined its autonomy. While the theory of authoritarian innovations offers useful parallels from Southeast Asia, systematic analysis of the discursive strategies underpinning Yoon’s approach and their translation into concrete policies remains limited. Drawing on Thorstein Veblen and Karl Polanyi’s perspectives on social disruption by dominant groups, this study extends the authoritarian innovations framework. It argues that Korea’s conservatives have repurposed widely accepted democratic norms–transparency, the rule of law, responsibility, citizenship, and equity–as rationales for repressive measures, a tactic termed ‘turning virtue into vice’. This approach allowed them to demobilise the labour movement while managing legitimacy challenges following the 2016 Candlelight Revolution. The study demonstrates that authoritarian innovations can operate through the normative language of democracy itself.