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.” 

China’s Shandong aircraft carrier is seen near Taiwan on March 31. (Taiwan Ministry of National Defense via AP)

Mahjar-Barducci said Yoon’s removal is part of a “pattern… all over the world” of right-wing candidates being forbidden from seeking election, including Romanian right-wing presidential frontrunner Călin Georgescu and French right-wing politician Le Pen. “The judiciary has been weaponized once again,” she explained.

The CCP’s hand in South Korea comes at a time when Beijing is holding large-scale military drills around Taiwan, with 19 vessels from the Chinese navy being spotted in the waters surrounding Taiwan between Monday and Tuesday morning. Mahjar-Barducci said that while Beijing has attempted to make such drills “a new normal,” it has also warned that the “drills could unexpectedly turn into a real war.”

South Korea will hold elections for a new president in two months. Fox News Digital has reported that surveys show liberal opposition Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung is “an early favorite” for the position.