Ever since she became embroiled with a cult-like celebrity adviser, whose antics included petitioning for donations and the state-purchase of thousands of Viagra pills, the writing was on the wall for South Korean President Park Geun-hye. And on Friday, her fall from grace and the highest office in the land was largely completed when lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to impeach her. Unlike in Brazil, when the impeachment process of Delma Rousseff dragged on for weeks, South Korean parliamentarians dispatched with the firing process quickly and decisively, with 234 out of the 300 in the House casting their secret ballots to end her tenure.
The result of the ballot was then sent to the Presidential House and it’s now up to the nation’s Constitutional Court whether the impeachment should be upheld — a process that can take 180 days. For Park, though, the result is a clear-cut signal to go, one that she had expected, though perhaps not by such a high margin. That represents a huge personal humiliation for a woman who had previously know nothing but electoral success over three decades in politics. The impeachment will placate the millions of South Koreans who had protested against her and her antics these past three months, and now that her fall from grace is largely complete, it’s essential that the nation finds a new leader soon.
While Park has been courting industrialists, corporations and cronies for donations, the sideshow it created simply allowed her nation to take its eyes off the ball. With the regime in Pyongyang developing ballistic missiles and working on perfecting its nuclear weaponry, the last thing South Koreans needed was a distraction entirely of Park’s making.
