2025: Year of recalibration

South Korea began 2025 amid constitutional rupture and ends it with renewed confidence in technocratic governance.

- 

The year's most arresting moments were political. A presidential impeachment closed one era, and the rapid inauguration of the Lee Jae Myung administration opened another, compressing the institutional shock into the space of a few months.

Yet the more consequential transformation unfolded away from the assembly hall. In 2025, Seoul stopped patching aging systems and began rewriting them. What emerged was not ideological fervor but strategic recalibration, shaped by the recognition that incremental fixes no longer matched the scale of national risk.

The pivotal shift was institutional. For decades, the State Prosecutors' Office served as the country's most dominant power center, a legacy of hypercentralized rule. Legislation passed this year set in motion its dismantling after 78 years, separating its functions and recalibrating authority across the state.