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On a cold January afternoon, a young pharmacy student, Shin Jeong-min, waited restlessly outside the Constitutional Court of South Korea, when the president suspended from the country arrived to fight his accusation.

While Yoon Suk Yeol testified, she sang along with hundreds of her enraged and worried followers, which have recovered since her failed attempt to impose martial law. “Free it now. Cancel your accusation,” they shouted.

“If the president is accused and the opposition leader is elected, our country will become one with North Korea and Kim Jong a,” said Jeong-min, citing a popular theory among President Yoon’s most fanatic followers: that The left -wing opposition party wants to unify with the north and turn South Korea into a communist country.

At 22, Jeong-min stands out from the Legion of elderly Koreans who have always feared and despised north, and constitute most of those who have these conspirators of extreme right.

That generation of Koreans, now in its 60s and 70s, lived through the Cold War and bitterly remembered the devastating consequences of the invasion of North Korea in the 1950s.

When Yoon declared martial law in early December, he played with these fears to justify his grip of power.

Without citing evidence, he affirmed that the “communist forces of North Korea” had infiltrated the opposition party and were trying to overthrow the country. They needed to be “eradicated,” he said, while moving quickly to ban political activity and put the army in charge.

Two months after his coup d’etat, an anti -communist frenzy is grabbing Yoon’s followers, young and old.

Even some who had never given much thought to North Korea or communism are now convinced that their dynamic democracy is about to become a dictatorship of the left, and that their leader had no choice but to eliminate the democratic rights of people for Protect them from both from Pyongyang and Beijing.

“This is a war between communism and democracy,” said an office officer of about 40 years, who had escaped work to join the protest in court.

Another man, in his 30 years, firmly argued that the president had to be returned to the position as soon as possible. “It will arrest all North Korean spies,” he said.

Such threats were once very real. During the 1960s and 70s, spies would try to regularly infiltrate the government.

In 1968, a group of North Korea commands crawled across the border and tried to kill then President Park Chung-Hee. A tree on the Bugak mountain of Seoul still carries the marks of the bullet of the intense weapons battles that shot for almost two weeks.

In the 1980s, during the last years of the violent military dictatorship of South Korea, a radical movement of extreme left -left students began to praise Pyongyang for its “superior” political system. They were labeled as “supporters” of the regime.

It was also common for authoritarian leaders to accuse their political adversaries of being conspirators of North Korea.

“Anticomunism became the dominant ideology of South Korea’s military dictators, who used it to control society and justify restricting people’s freedom,” said Shin Jin-Wook, a professor of sociology at Chungang University.

Today, these threats have dissipated. Pyongyang nuclear weapons and advanced cyber overmaking skills represent the greatest risk, and would have difficulty finding anyone in South Korea who wants to emulate life in the north. The political left and right are simply divided on how to deal with their problematic neighbor.

Although Yoon’s conservative Power Power Conservative focus has been to try to threaten the north in submission with military superiority, the leftist Democratic party prefers to commit to Pyongyang, believing that the two countries can coexist peacefully.

The president has been accused of exploiting people’s historical fears. “Yoon’s rhetoric coincides almost completely with that of past dictators, and he is the first president to use this anti -communist ideology so blatant since Korea became a democracy in 1987,” said Shin.

Yoon has not only accused the Parliament, led by the Opposition Democratic Party, of being plagued by Pyongyang supporters, but has hung the idea that North Korea, with the help of China, manipulated the parliamentary elections of last year .

“These are false news prepared by Yoon to demonize the opposition and justify its completely antidemocratic movement,” a legislator of the Democratic Party, Wi Sung-Lac told the BBC.

“We have a long history of struggle for democracy and freedom in Korea. We are the ones who managed to frustrate Yoon’s attemp Parliament walls during martial law to vote the motion.

These ideas were previously pedaled by extreme conservative groups, said Lee Sangsin, a voting expert at the National Unification Institute of Korea.

“These groups were isolated. People didn’t take much attention,” he explained. “But because Yoon is the president, his words have weight, and many people have accepted what he said.”

This was evident in one of the Pro-Yoon weekend demonstrations to which we attended last month. Far from being theoretical of the staunch conspiracy, almost all of us who spoke said Yoon had changed their thoughts.

“At first I didn’t support Yoon, but martial law opened my eyes,” said Oh Jung-Hyuk, a 57-year-old musician, there with his wife. “We can see how deeply rooted are the leftist forces in our society.” A woman in her 40s told us that she previously had doubts about the Chinese vote rig, but had investigated the issue after martial law and “realized that it was true.”

Yoon’s supporters often point out real events: how the former president of the Democratic Party, Moon Jae-in, met Kim Jong a to try to orchestrate a peace agreement; That the current Democratic leader, Lee Jae -Mung, is being investigated for helping to send millions of dollars to North Korea, then use these as evidence of a major plot.

“This theory of the crazy conspiracy that China manipulated the elections is becoming increasingly accepted,” said Sociology professor, Mr. Shin. “One of the most basic consensus in a democracy is the premise of fair and free elections, and now we have people who distrust that. This is very extreme.”

As Yoon’s without foundation statements have rooted, their support seems to have grown. Although most people in South Korea still want it permanently from the position, the number has fallen. Last week it was 57%compared to 75% in the week after the declaration of martial law.

Through his anti -communist rhetoric, Yoon has also effectively used distrust over low heat with China. Temer North Korea now means being distrustful of China as well.

In a recent weekend rally in Seoul, many followers had changed their electoral fraud posters of “stopping the robbery” for those who read “Chinese Communist Party”.

“I think China is interfering with all the political matters of South Korea. He is pulling the threads behind the scene,” said Jo Yeon-Zok, 66, who was holding one of the signals.

According to the voting expert, Mr. Lee, “a growing part of the public now believes that China wants to turn South Korea into some type of vassall state.”

For those aged 20 and 30 who have never experienced a real danger of North Korea, China is a more credible threat. Last year, the PEW Research Center discovered that South Korea and Hungary were the only two countries where Young people had a more negative vision of China than the old man.

But contrary to the information that is being fed, the fears of young people have nothing to do with communism, said Cho Jin-Man, a political scientist from the University of Women of Duksung.

Until recently, the South Koreans felt that their country was superior to China, explained Cho, but as Beijing has become stronger and more assertive than they have I started seeing it as a threatespecially since the United States began to treat it as such.

In addition to that, young people have many complaints: they are struggling to find work or pay a home, and feel resentful when they see their universities serve Chinese students.

Communism, Mr. Cho, believes, is being used as a convenient Bogey man to awaken fear and hate. This message is amplified by the extreme right YouTube channels, particularly popular among young men.

“North Korea and China are my biggest concerns,” said Kim Gyung-Joo, a 30-year-old developer, who came only to one of the protesters. He used to be left as his friends, he said, and initially very critical of the president’s martial law order. But after investigating the problem on YouTube, he realized that the martial law was “inevitable.”

“If I had been in the president’s position, I would also have declared it,” he said.

However, Wi Sung-Lac, the opposition politician, is not worried that his party loses support. “Although these extreme opinions are spreading, they will be limited,” he said. “Most people understand who we really are, and yearn for a return to normal.”

Voting expert Lee Sang-Sin is less optimistic, comparing Yoon’s supporters with “a rapid growth”. The president’s movement was “very divisive,” he said.

“It will have a lasting effect on Korean society.”

Additional reports from Hosu Lee and Leehyun Choi