The far right and democratic backsliding in South Korea: mainstreaming, normalization, and radicalization

Introduction The far right has moved from the margins of established democracies to their institutional core, often enabled by the very mainstream parties, media, and civil-society actors that once contained it. South Korea sharpens this problem into a puzzle: long celebrated as a consolidated, resilient democracy, it produced a presidential self-coup on 3 December 2024. This article asks how the far right eroded Korean democracy from within, and why that democracy has proved only “breakdown resilient” – able to recover from acute crises yet unable to prevent their recurrence. Methods The study applies the mainstreaming – normalization – radicalization framework to a single-case, process-tracing analysis of the Korean conservative camp from the New Right movement of the early 2000s to the self-coup and its aftermath. Drawing on primary sources (including National Assembly records and news reporting) and secondary scholarship, it reconstructs the recent consolidation of the far right across three phases (2021–2026) and adapts the framework – developed for Western-European multiparty settings – to a polarized two-party system. Results The self-coup emerges not as a rupture but as the culmination of a path-dependent trajectory. Far-right dynamics operated intra-party, capturing the People Power Party from within rather than through an autonomous challenger; defining attributes were functionally substituted (anti-communism doing the work of nativism, an authoritarian legacy lowering the threshold for re-radicalization); and party radicalization was mutually reinforced by civil-society co-production – think tanks, revisionist historians, evangelical networks, and far-right YouTubers, alongside Japanese and American transnational ties. The 2024 insurrection accelerated rather than reversed this dynamic, amplified by affective partisan polarization. Conclusion The framework is portable beyond its Western-European origins if the far right is treated as a family-resemblance category and analysis looks inside dominant parties rather than for challenger ones. The case cautions that electoral alternation can mask hollowed-out preventive capacity, and that institutional maturity can become a resource for – rather than a safeguard against – democratic erosion from within.