South Korea’s democracy held after a 6-hour power play. What does it say for democracies elsewhere?

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — In an era of rising authoritarianism, at the heels of a six-hour martial law decree that unfolded while many South Koreans slept, something noteworthy happened: Democracy held.

The past week in Seoul, officials and academics warn, is what a threat to democracy looks like in 2024. It’s a democratically elected president declaring martial law over the nation he leads, asserting sweeping powers to prevent opposition demonstrations, ban political parties and control the media. It’s members of the military attempting to block lawmakers from exercising their power to vote on cancelling the power grab.

And here’s what it took to defeat President Yoon Suk Yeol ‘s lurch toward government by force:

Unified popular support for democracy. Legislators storming the National Assembly past midnight, live-streaming themselves climbing over fences. A politician grabbing at a soldier’s rifle and yelling “Aren’t you ashamed?” until he retreated. And finally, decisively, Parliament assembling a quorum and voting unanimously to cancel martial law.

It was a victory for a hard-won democracy — and for the idea that checks and balances among branches of government must work to counteract each other’s ambitions, as the American founders wrote in the Federalist Papers in 1788.

But as the drama played out in Seoul, the scaffolding of democracy rattled around the world.

It said something about the rule of law

In other countries, the grab for power might have worked. Other would-be authoritarians might have been better prepared than Yoon.

In deeply polarized societies — the United States, for example, where Republicans are staunchly loyal to president-elect Donald Trump — there might not have been decisive support from the