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Thailand's elemental political conflict

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In Brief

Last year, fire; this year, water.

The largest demonstrations in Thailand’s political history ended with over 90 deaths in April–May 2010, but 18 months later, with the country’s biggest floods in half a century, some believed that togetherness in suffering would revive a mythical ‘national unity’.

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Instead the floods soon became a new focus of conflict across the political divide.

In Thailand today, conflict seems elemental.

The country is currently in the middle of massive historical change. Over the past generation, the average per capita income has tripled in real terms. People at all levels of society — but especially those with lower incomes — have acquired new assets, developed new aspirations, had more reasons to make demands on government and lost old feelings of deference. One of the telling slogans of recent protests is ta sawang laeo, ‘our eyes are wide open now’.

The political system lagged behind these changes, and the bureaucracy, military and monarchy have continued to monopolise power and obstruct the parliament’s development. The bureaucracy still conducts itself more like a ruling caste than a public service. The military ran the country for half a century and still claims the right to intervene in politics — through coup, through interfering with elections, and through manipulating the formation of governing coalitions. The monarchy has acquired greater moral authority as the reign has lengthened, and has entered more and more into the political sphere through intervention at times of crisis, through the king’s public commentary on political issues, and through Royal Projects of economic development. Until recently, parliament functioned principally as a means to co-opt rich businessmen into the networks laced between these three key institutions.

With social change outstripping political development, more people have come to resent the centralisation of power, the inadequate and uneven distribution of public goods, the seemingly elevated and untouchable nature of the powerful, and the continued permeation of traditional attitudes about social hierarchy. These resentments fed into support for Thaksin Shinawatra in the early 2000s. Although he had not earlier shown interest in the  downtrodden and seemed focused on swelling his own fortune, he became the first Thai politician to recognise the new social forces bubbling up from below. He offered some simple but highly effective social policies, and he positioned himself as a leader who would respond to ‘the people’ rather than an old elite. He was rewarded with rock-star-like popularity and a crushing electoral victory, winning 75 per cent of parliamentary seats in 2005.

The backlash came fast and hard. Thaksin was deposed in September 2006 and driven into exile. His party was dissolved and his supporters treated to military campaigns of propaganda and intimidation. When these measures failed to destroy Thaksin’s support, the retribution went further, modifying the constitution to lessen the importance of parliament and the executive in favour of the bureaucracy and judiciary, reviving the military’s influence through a new internal security act, instituting new measures to control dissent, and questioning whether Thailand needed electoral democracy at all.

This backlash, in turn, created the red shirt movement. Like others of its kind, forged in the heat of social change, the movement contains many contradictory elements. The core consists of Thailand’s less well-off, especially the more upwardly mobile among them, who have realised the potential of the vote to effect change. But there are also many business owners: they see Thaksin as a leader who can challenge the stifling bureaucracy and help the economy grow. And in the country’s northeast and upper north, the red shirt movement emerged as a route for peripheral regions to gain greater weight and respect.

The red shirt demonstrations had a single demand: to hold an election. When negotiations failed, the standoff between the government and the demonstrators deteriorated into violence, after which both sides talked brightly about ‘reconciliation’ — but their actions spoke otherwise. The government tried to focus public attention on arson attacks, labelling the red shirts terrorists, and put several hundred into jail or detention. The red shirts, by contrast, vaunted the dead as martyrs for democracy. The legacy was one of increased polarisation, and it was in this context that the 3 July 2011 election was called.

The old guard and much of the middle class believed that the Democrat Party could win the poll. The party had copied most of Thaksin’s ‘populist’ policies and added others, notably on education. It allied itself with minor parties that were ready to use money and official influence to win support in the opposition’s heartlands. And it hoped that the violence of April–May 2010 had turned many away from supporting the Thaksinites.

In any case, Thaksin’s side seemed in disarray. Many key figures were still in jail, and over a hundred were still under a five-year ban from politics. Relations between red shirt activists and politicians in Thaksin’s Pheu Thai Party were strained in many localities. Thaksin himself was overseas, and none of several possible caretaker figures had popular support.

But with the announcement of the election in early May 2011, the Pheu Thai Party promptly elected Thaksin’s youngest sister, Yingluck, as leader, and Thaksin dubbed her as his ‘clone’. Immediately, the election was ‘about Thaksin’, and about people’s attitudes to his achievements as prime minister and to the backlash against him and against parliamentary democracy.

At the 3 July poll, the Pheu Thai Party gained an absolute majority, winning 265 of 500 seats — the Democrats trailed with only 159 seats. Pheu Thai gained 15.8 million votes on the party list (a national vote by party), an increase of around 25 per cent on its 2007 result. Minor parties fared badly, especially those hoping to undermine Pheu Thai with money and influence. In short, the election mirrored a serious divide in ideology and allegiance in the country, and delivered a clear result.

But the forces responsible for the earlier backlash against democracy seemed to feel little obligation to respect this result. Suvit Maesinee, an academic close to the business community, commented: ‘I don’t think the fact that Pheu Thai won decisively at the polls means much. Ultimately, Thailand might need to consider whether the system of one man, one vote is best for us or not’. The Bangkok press, which tends to reflect urban middle-class opinion, barely veiled its hostility to the new government.

In the aftermath, observers hazarded four scenarios for the near future. The first envisions a backstairs deal to reverse spiralling polarisation. Under this deal, the Yingluck government would not be disrupted and Thaksin would be allowed to return to Thailand as long as the Thaksinite camp agreed to curb rising anti-monarchism. In the second, the government would survive because its opposition was an exhausted wreck: the army discredited by its interventions in politics, the Democrats defeated and demoralised, and the royalist yellow shirt movement dissolved in mutual backbiting. In the third, the opposition would temporarily lay low, waiting for the usual government failures and scandals to create the right conditions for attack, and politics would soon return to the fractious instability of recent years. Under the fourth scenario, an attempt to overthrow the government would provoke much stronger opposition than was evoked by the 2006 coup, shifting the political polarisation into a more violent phase.

Which scenario might prevail remains unclear, but stability seems unlikely. The rising floods have merely provided an opportunity, which critics seized with indecent haste and vehemence, to mock Yingluck for her inexperience, accuse her ministers of incompetence and disunity, and call on the government to resign or at least junk the policy platform on which it was elected.

Come fire or flood, Thailand’s elemental conflicts will continue.

Chris Baker taught Asian history and politics at Cambridge University and is now an independent researcher and writer based in Bangkok. He is a Visiting Fellow at the Center of Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University.

This article appeared in the most recent edition of the East Asia Forum Quarterly, ‘Where is Thailand Headed?’.

One response to “Thailand’s elemental political conflict”

  1. What I am worried most is the news that December 10, 2012 will be a bloodshed day in eliminating the red shirts throughout Thailand; it will be the end point not the changing point. When there is a long history of enmity between the majority of the Thai people and the Thai monarchy, I think everyone must take this threat seriously. Given the record of King Amanda’s death, I wonder if there are any security measures from international community to assist in preventing the possibility of tragedy.

    Similar to his approach in writing about the Thai politics previous, Chris Baker attacks every other element except the Thai monarchy and Bhumibol, the main factor of the current Thai political crisis.

    As in other professional practices, the ethical practice of research and scholarship may be challenged in some circumstances. Due to the Thai lese majeste laws, at such times, some scholars choose to avoid the Code of Ethics guidance. The Code of Ethics requires analysts to avoid discrimination in conducting research. Such discrimination might come about, for example, if researchers omit certain populations from study.

    Also, lese majeste law raises the competence issue for analysts in conducting research about Thai politics. For example, the book titled ‘Southern Thai Encyclopedia’ in Craig’s Book Reviews in the New Mandala, Australia, explains the evolution of the Chakri Dynasty from Nakorn Si Thammarat, yet no analyst has utilized those information. Furthermore, the European historiographers writing about Southeast Asia, explained how the German colonial power had contacted Rama I which led to the murder of the Chinese Thai King in the regime change from Thonburi to Bangkok. During this period, 150 of King Taksin’s close confidants were killed. Prohibiting discussion of issues relating to Thai national security, political crisis, and the Asia Pacific’s great powers objectives, analysts of the Thai politics face the issue of competence.

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