Reports indicate that Abhisit believed going to the polls early would be more advantageous to his party. Crucially, he also wanted to avoid further confrontation with red shirt demonstrators, whose anger and frustration over his role in the April–May 2010 brutal crackdown and its stalled investigation remained. This is the context in which July’s election took place, with wounds still fresh and society deeply divided by years of political turmoil.

Although several civilian governments had taken office since the 2006 coup, the military continued to play a dominant role in the country’s political system, and a series of mass protests on both sides of the political divide disrupted economic activity and made it difficult for governments to implement important reforms. Against this background of continuous crisis, many observers questioned the election’s potential to bring peace and stability. Some thought it would exacerbate the conflict and lead to even more violence. Tellingly, members of the Election Commission asked the caretaker government to declare a state of emergency to cover the election campaign, as they expected violence of a kind that would be impossible to manage within the regular legal framework.

Yet the 3 July election was one of the most peaceful elections since Thailand’s process of democratisation began in the 1970s. There were a few incidents of violence and a number of people were killed and injured, but the numbers were significantly lower than any election since the 1980s.

The July election witnessed a number of positive developments which suggest that electoral democracy is healthy. Voter turnout was 75 per cent — the highest in history. And voter enthusiasm was strong even in the troubled south, which suffers from insurgent violence. A high degree of electoral participation was also seen in the thousands of citizens who volunteered to observe and monitor the electoral process to guarantee it was free, fair and peaceful. Many civic organisations launched public campaigns and rallies encouraging all stakeholders to campaign peacefully and accept the electoral results. This phenomenon is unprecedented in modern Thai elections.

The nature of the electoral contest between the political parties provides a final example of the significant progress made in July. Previous elections were notoriously tainted by fraud, intimidation and vote-buying. These malpractices remain, but their effect on the electoral outcome has substantially diminished. Party performance, policy packages and political ideology were the dominant influences on voting behaviour this time round, and evidence suggests that parties and candidates who employed dirty tactics performed poorly in the polls.

It is also clear that polarisation and ideological politics benefited the two major parties — the Democrats of Abhisit and the Pheu Thai Party of Yingluck Shinawatra — and hurt smaller parties. Since the 2001 elections, in which party policy and campaigning started to matter more than sheer force of personality, the majority of voters have opted for one of the two main parties. From 2001–07, for example, the two major parties won between 75 per cent and 95 per cent of parliamentary seats. The 2007 coup-installed constitution tried to reverse this trend by changing the electoral system and weakening political parties, but this attempt at institutional design had only minor effects on voting patterns. The Thai people have shown they know how to use their votes to obtain political stability and effective policy implementation.

While the July election does not solve Thailand’s underlying problems, it has brought the country out of a protracted crisis and the threat of deadly outcomes. Moreover, it has proven that parliamentary democracy could be re-established and has not been rejected by the majority of Thai people, even while they hold different ideologies and values.

Yet the risk of democratic breakdown and instability continues. A tiny but powerful royal-military-bureaucratic alliance still wants to return the country to an old model of ‘semi-democracy’, in which the bureaucracy and military dominate politics under the auspices of the monarchy. This alliance does not accept the basic democratic principle of ‘one man, one vote’, as it supposedly goes against Thai society’s traditional hierarchical structure. This conservative force is not willing to compete in electoral politics but still controls critical parts of the state apparatus, such as the army, courts and some parts of the bureaucracy. Consequently, it still has the capacity to destabilise elected government. While this state of affairs persists, a coup or some other form of political intervention from the traditional elites cannot be ruled out. A big challenge for Thailand is to convince all sides to acknowledge the equal political rights of Thai citizens and to uphold democratic ideals.

If traditional political forces are unwilling to play within the democratic rules, Thailand will continue to face uncertainty and instability in years to come.

Prajak Kongkirati is a scholar at the Department of Political and Social Change, the Australian National University. 

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