Park Geun-hye, the president of South Korea, was impeached, marking the culmination of the country's political scandal.

Park Geun-hye is a South Korean politician who served as the 11th president of South Korea from 2013 until her removal from office in 2017. Park was the first and to date only woman to be elected president of South Korea, and also the first woman to be popularly elected as a head of state in East Asia. She is also the first South Korean president to be born after the founding of South Korea. Her father, Park Chung-hee, was president from 1963 to 1979, serving five consecutive terms after he seized power in 1961 and whom she served as first lady under from 1974 until his assassination in 1979.

On 9 December 2016, Park Geun-hye, the president of South Korea, was impeached as the culmination of a political scandal involving interventions to the presidency from her aide, Choi Soon-sil. 234 members of the 300-member National Assembly voted to impeach and temporarily suspend Park's presidential powers and duties. This exceeded the required two-thirds threshold in the National Assembly and, although the vote was by secret ballot, the results indicated that more than half of the 128 lawmakers in Park's party Saenuri had supported her impeachment. Thus, Hwang Kyo-ahn, then Prime Minister of South Korea, became acting president while the Constitutional Court of Korea was due to determine whether to accept the impeachment. The court upheld the impeachment in a unanimous 8–0 decision on 10 March 2017, removing Park from office. The regularly scheduled presidential election was advanced to 9 May 2017, and Moon Jae-in, former leader of the Democratic Party, who Park had narrowly defeated in the 2012 presidential election, was elected as Park's permanent successor.

The 2016 South Korean political scandal, often called Park Geun-hye–Choi Soon-sil Gate in South Korea, was a scandal that emerged around October 2016 in relation to the unusual access that Choi Soon-sil, the daughter of shaman-esque cult leader Choi Tae-min, had to President Park Geun-hye of South Korea.