Thai elections: Democracy
delayed By Shawn W
Crispin
BANGKOK - As Thailand gears up for
Sunday's general election, the results are a
foregone conclusion. The more pressing question
is, what happens next?
Running unopposed
in 271 out of 400 constituencies, caretaker Prime
Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's Thai Rak Thai party
is guaranteed to win a landslide majority. The
main opposition Democrat Party is boycotting the
elections, insisting that Thaksin resign and allow
King Bhumibol Adulyadej to appoint an interim
government that would oversee constitutional
reform.
The election will be held against
the backdrop of a growing and
increasingly assertive
people-power movement, the People's Alliance for
Democracy (PAD), which is also calling upon the
revered monarch to appoint a neutral prime
minister. Last week PAD staged its largest
protests yet in Bangkok's main shopping and
business districts. The movement's leaders have
criticized the election's legitimacy and have
vowed to resume their protests on April 7.
Thailand's wobbly democracy faces its
biggest test since the military seized power from
an elected government in 1991, and later in 1992
opened fire on protesters demanding a return to
democracy. Thaksin dissolved parliament and called
the snap poll in late February in a bid to renew
his mandate and firm up his sagging political
legitimacy. His government has been rocked by the
PAD's allegations, ranging from disloyalty to the
throne to rampant corruption to selling national
security-sensitive assets to Singapore.
Those accusations have resonated deeply
with Bangkok's politically powerful upper and
middle classes, which when mobilized onto the
streets, have historically driven different
scandal-ridden governments from office.
Crisis ahead, crisis
behind Thaksin, whose popularity remains
strong in the provinces outside Bangkok, has
insisted that Sunday's election results should put
a stop to the growing anti-government protests.
His campaign managers aim to win more than the 19
million votes they secured last year, which
resulted in an overwhelming 375 seats for Thai Rak
Thai in the 500-seat parliament. Thaksin has
promised to stand down if his party receives less
than half of all ballots cast.
But it is
just as likely that contentious election results
will add more fuel to the protesters' fire.
Opposition allegations that Thai Rak Thai party
members manipulated the Election Commission's
database to allow small, unknown parties to
compete in the election have already raised doubts
about the poll's integrity. The accused officials
have denied the charges and filed criminal
defamation charges against Democrat secretary
general Suthep Thaugsuban.
More
significantly, the elections are almost guaranteed
to result in an unprecedented sort of
constitutional crisis, which depending on how
events unfold, could conceivably lend itself to a
resolution through royal intervention.
Many Thai Rak Thai candidates who are
running unopposed in constituencies loyal to the
Democrat Party will not garner the 20% of eligible
votes legally necessary to assume their seat in
parliament, political analysts predict. And
because one senior Thai Rak Thai candidate
dramatically resigned and ordained as a Buddhist
monk after the election was called, the party will
only have 99 of the necessary 100 party list
candidates. In both instances the election would
be deemed incomplete by the Election Commission
and parliament could not legally convene to select
a prime minister.
Thaksin's lawyers have
already prepared a sort of legal fudge for such an
eventuality. Bhokin Polakul, former parliament
president and legal advisor to the prime minister,
has argued that parliament could be informally
opened but not formally convened for as long as
necessary until Thai Rak Thai candidates are able
to achieve the 20% threshold for all 400
constituencies through a series of ongoing
runoffs.
Brushing off his critics, Thaksin
has indicated his willingness to steer a one-party
government, vowing that he would use absolute
control of parliament to amend hundreds of laws he
claims undermine the interests of the country's
rural poor. On the campaign trail, he has promised
to expand his government's populist 30 baht health
care scheme, to provide laptop computers to all
children entering the public school system, and to
extend his "1 million cows" policy into more rural
areas. (The current plan calls for cattle to be
distributed to a million households over three
years.)
Critics say a one-party government
would also give Thaksin unprecedented leverage to
push through other measures, dressed up as
economic reforms, that would effectively benefit
his colleagues' and family's big business
interests. Many state enterprises and
state-controlled broadcast and telecommunications
frequencies are scheduled for privatization.
Thaksin's tendency to reward loyalty has
piqued a wide cross-section of traditional Thai
business elites, who have been marginalized by
many of Thaksin's economic and financial policies.
His government has taken particularly hard aim at
the business families that control the few
remaining commercial banks. The same thing has
happened inside the historically powerful Thai
bureaucracy, where Thaksin has sidelined or sacked
many seasoned technocrats to clear the way for his
political allies.
In many ways, then,
Thailand's political conflict is actually a
reflection of the ongoing power struggle between
Bangkok old money elites vying to protect their
interests and reassert their influence against the
new money elites, represented by Thaksin's
business-minded political clan, that for the past
five years have aggressively aimed to undermine
them. A new democratic mandate shored up by rural
voters will do little to defuse the urban-oriented
elite-on-elite divisions Thaksin's rule has opened
and accentuated, political analysts say.
Mobs, bombs and
crackdowns Historically, Thailand's
political imbroglio has significant regional
precedents. Thailand's PAD has obviously cribbed
its protest cues from the people-power movement
that coalesced in 1986 to oust from power the
Philippines' democratically elected dictator,
Ferdinand Marcos. A similar popular movement
unceremoniously pushed democratically elected
Indonesian strongman Suharto from power in 1998.
Both authoritarian leaders famously
manipulated elections to lend democratic
legitimacy to their long and heavy-handed rule. In
Indonesia, Suharto famously orchestrated what he
referred to as "festivals of democracy", dressing
up polls that were tightly controlled by his
Golkar party's formidable political and military
machinery. Marcos similarly stage-managed
elections, mainly to please his military allies in
the US.
Rampant corruption and abuse of
power finally undercut the legitimacy of both
Southeast Asian authoritarian regimes. Now with
similar allegations being lodged against Thaksin's
democratically elected government, the question is
whether Thailand has reached a similar point of
political inflection.
For Thailand's
protest movement, the historical signposts are
just as worrying as they are hopeful. Opposition
Democrat Party leader Abhisit Vejjajiva recently
noted to reporters that his party boycotted
elections in 1957, in a similar bid to undermine
the authority of an abusive regime. The end result
of that political brinkmanship was a military coup
and an even heavier-handed military government.
Both Suharto and Marcos came under varying
degrees of popular pressure to resign their posts,
and both leaders cracked down viciously against
their opponents, suspending civil liberties and
jailing dissenters in the process. A series of
mysterious bombs blasted public buildings, private
offices and department stores in Manila in 1972,
blamed on communists but planted by Marcos's
allies, provided the pretext for Marcos to declare
martial law, crack down on the media, jail the
opposition and maintain an unrivaled grip on power
for an additional 16 years.
It is not
inconceivable that Thaksin will attempt to do the
same, particularly if the protests intensify after
the election. There are growing hints that
Byzantine politics are at play. A series of
mysterious bombs have been planted in front of the
offices and headquarters of various PAD leaders.
In late March, a bomb was defused before
detonating in front of the Democrat Party's
Bangkok headquarters. A bomb also exploded in
front of the residence of chief privy councilor
Prem Tinsulanonda, widely viewed as reclusive King
Bhumibol's public conscience.
Thai police
investigating the incidents have failed to uncover
any leads or suspects behind the small-scale
explosions. At the same time, police have started
to record the critical public speeches made by PAD
protest leaders, and last week Thaksin filed
criminal defamation lawsuits against four Thai
newspapers that published in full the speeches of
protest leaders. Criminal defamation charges in
Thailand carry a possible two years in prison.
Thai Rak Thai officials have also said
they have compiled enough evidence to file as many
as 40 different criminal defamation suits against
PAD ringleader and media personality Sondhi
Limthongkul. They are also investigating
allegations that one of Sondhi's recent speeches
could be construed as lese majeste for referring
to the monarchy.
Kom Chad Leuk, a Thai
language daily that published Sondhi's remarks,
publicly apologized and agreed to stop publishing
for five days after having their offices besieged
by pro-Thaksin supporters. It is altogether
possible that Thaksin might make legal moves
against other critics who have mentioned the
monarchy in their public critiques of his
government - carrying possible jail terms of more
than 20 years.
There are ominous signs
that Thaksin's government is preparing for a
crackdown. One senior Thai Rak Thai party member
has already indicated that the government will
view any protests held after Sunday's election as
"acts of rebellion", signaling a possible more
confrontational approach toward the so far
peaceful protests. Thaksin's unexplained promotion
of Deputy Prime Minister Chidchai Vanasatidya, a
former police general and close Thaksin ally, as
his second in command has been interpreted by some
political insiders as a move designed to absolve
the premier from legal responsibility for an
eventual police-led crackdown on protesters.
Any crackdown would almost certainly
require the military to step in and restore law
and order. And there are signs that Thaksin is
preparing for just such an eventuality. This
year's mid-year military reshuffle has been
delayed due to the deteriorating political
situation. Army Commander Sonthi Boonyaratkalin,
who has steadfastly insisted that the army would
remain neutral and not get involved in the
conflict, has reportedly expressed his displeasure
at Thaksin's attempts to promote a large number of
his former Class 10 police cadet school colleagues
over more senior officers to army units
responsible for Bangkok's security.
Above the fray King Bhumibol's
steadying and unifying influence sets Thailand
apart from other regional countries that have
slipped into prolonged periods of political chaos.
The monarch hovers above the cut-and-thrust fray
of daily politics, and historically has intervened
only in times of genuine national crisis, most
recently during the bloodshed of 1992.
So
far the palace has maintained its steely silence
to opposition calls for royal interventions to
remove Thaksin. Through Article 7, the Thai
constitution allows for the monarch to provide
"guidance" in dealing with problems that are not
specifically outlined in the constitution. Thaksin
has indicated he would step down if King Bhumibol
says he should, but legal scholars say his
replacement would have to be elected by parliament.
Sunday's election will inevitably lead
Thailand toward a constitutional void. By calling
an election that, due to the opposition's boycott,
will not meet all the legal requirements under the
1997 charter, Thaksin faces a potential
post-election constitutional challenge from his
opponents. If parliament can not be legally
convened, and the country drifts into political
chaos without a functioning government, then the
conditions would be ripe under Article 7 for the
King's intervention.
As Thailand heads for
inconclusive polls and the people-power movement
vows to up the tempo of its protests, King
Bhumibol's influence increasingly seems the best
bet for a peaceful and lasting solution to
Thailand's grinding political conflict.
Shawn W Crispin is Asia Times
Online's Southeast Asia editor
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing
.)
