S. Nathan Park is an attorney in Washington, D.C., whose commentary on Korean affairs has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and the Financial Times, among other publications. (June 2018)
By 2016, the young people of the 2002 World Cup generation had reached early middle-age, forming the electoral core of Korean society. When President Park was exposed as a feeble-minded puppet, Korean civil society staged one of the greatest protests in the modern democratic history: the Candlelight Protests, which lasted from November 2016 to March 2017. In the cold of winter, more than a million people chanted and sang to demand a restoration of democracy. Like the Taegeuk Warriors team in 2002, against the odds they won.