Thaksin juggernaut set to crush opponents
By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK - Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is laying out a banquet of handouts - including the promise of gifts from the government for every child born after July 2005 - to entice voters to back his party in forthcoming general elections.

The list of freebies and other gifts for the electorate, announced last week to kick off the election campaign of Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai (Thai Loves Thai, TRT) party, cut across the rural and urban divide.

Farmers have been promised cows under a special "cash cow" program that will provide each farm family with a calf, which will be raised and sold, the profits put back into the farm. The premier also assured the rural poor that each of the country's 75,000 villages would receive more cash to develop the grassroots economy.

Residents of Bangkok, meanwhile, would see the congested city's mass-transit system improved at a cost of 1 trillion baht (US$24.3 billion), were they to re-elect the Thaksin government. Low-income earners in the city have been promised a tax break, with the minimum taxable annual income being set at 100,000 baht from the current 80,000 baht.

Elections will be held on February 13 if Thaksin does not dissolve parliament earlier.

"Thai Rak Thai has the solution for the country. Others just keep attacking," Thaksin told a gathering of foreign correspondents and diplomats on Thursday in defense of his pre-election pledges. "That is destructive politics, and it does not work anymore."

Even some of his harshest critics admit that Thaksin's long list of promises will appear more attractive to the electorate because of their concrete nature, unlike vague pledges made in the past by his predecessors.

"Thaksin has ushered in something new to Thai politics in the way he promises to implement concrete policies to win votes," Thitinan Pongsudhrirak, a political scientist at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University, told Inter Press Service.

Such an approach was unveiled when Thaksin led his newly formed TRT in the election campaign for the January 2001 poll. Among the promises made was one to transform the health care system to enable Thais to receive medical attention for any ailment by paying only 30 baht per hospital visit.

According to Thitinan, that "first generation of populist policies were rooted in economic principles" as part of Thaksin's vision to build a Thai society shaken by the financial crisis of 1997.

However, the political scientist feels differently about the populist program on offer for the forthcoming poll. "The latest pledges are a way to legitimize vote buying, which often happens in Thai politics but is much more shoddy," said Thitinan. "It is naked spending to win support."

Further, economists critical of the government say Thaksin has not revealed where he will be getting the money to fund this new round of handouts. They are also worried at the increasing level of public expenditure the country will have to shoulder as a result.

Thaksin's edge over the opposition
Thaksin is hitting the campaign trail with an edge over his rivals, the Democrat Party. The prospects of the opposition look dim. According to an opinion poll conducted by the Bangkok-based Assumption University, voters in all 400 constituencies in the country admitted favoring the governing party over the opposition. The university poll also said that nearly 49% of the people polled between September 23 and October 12 indicated they would vote for the TRT, against the 34.9% who favored the Democrats.

Last Friday's edition of the Bangkok Post, an English-language daily, summed up Thaksin's prevailing political fortunes in an editorial: "Unless there is a miracle, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra looks set to return for his second term in office."

Such an eventuality would earn Thaksin two unique places in Thailand's political history: the first prime minister ever to have completed his full four-year term, and the first leader to win back-to-back elections and return for a second term. None of the 22 prime ministers who preceded him ever finished their full terms due to the fragile coalitions they assembled in parliament, or to military coups.
Over the past 50 years, Thai politics has been in a state of flux. During that period, the country had 16 new constitutions and experienced 17 military coups.

That Thaksin's populist agenda resonated with the Thai electorate in the January 2001 election was evident by the thumping mandate he received to form a government with a comfortable majority. Currently, the TRT and its coalition members have 364 seats in the 500-seat parliament.

During its first two years in government, the ruling TRT gained increasing approval, as opinion polls revealed, by its commitment to deliver on its promises - a fact that set it apart from previous administrations.

Thaksin rode this wave of popularity until December last year, when he was voted "Person of the Year" in an independent poll; he received 82.5% support from the 2,203 Thais surveyed - a number that dwarfed the runner-up, a high-profile forensic expert who received 3.6% support.

Thaksin was aided by the increasing signs of prosperity in the country and confidence in the government's ability to manage the economy through its dual-track agenda - increasing domestic demand and consumer spending while promoting export-led growth.

Since January, however, the Thaksin administration has faced mounting crises. They include violence in the predominantly Muslim provinces in the south, where nearly 350 people have been killed, and the spread of bird flu, which has killed 11 Thais and devastated chicken farmers.

Thaksin has also been accused of displaying authoritarian-like behavior by a growing number of critics - many of them from academic circles, non-governmental groups and the media.

Despite that, academics such as Thitinan expect Thaksin to return to power, though he may have to be content with winning fewer seats in parliament than he had originally anticipated. "What is at stake is the margin of the victory," political scientist Thitinan said. "He [Thaksin] once boasted of getting 400 seats [in the 500-seat house] at the next elections."

(Inter Press Service)