In a week that saw French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen banned from running for office, the South Korean Constitutional Court’s ouster of President Yoon Suk Yeol from office on Friday has critics looking towards Beijing’s hand in efforts to remove the leader from power.

“Yoon’s foreign and security policies stand in stark contrast to the pro-China figures long supported and controlled by the [Chinese Communist Party (CCP)],” Anna Mahjar-Barducci, Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) project director, told Fox News Digital. She explained that those policies “posed a threat to Beijing’s long-term strategy of cultivating a pro-China faction in South Korea,”

Mahjar-Barducci claimed the CCP has used “overt economic cooperation, political donations, covert benefit transfers and even illegal sexual bribery” to cultivate “certain South Korean political figures over time, aiming to undermine the U.S.-South Korea alliance, weaken South Korea’s strategic independence and expand its regional influence at the expense of the U.S.” 

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