Peter Hartcher
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD POLITICAL AND INTERNATIONAL EDITOR
The country once known as the Land of Smiles now wears a permanent grimace.
Thailand has spent some four decades trying to establish a functional democracy. But Sunday's election has brought the country no closer to the goal.
The 46-year-old Prime Minister of Thailand, Yingluck Shinawatra, the country's first female leader, brought on an early election to answer the accusation that her government was illegitimate.
The opposition Democrat Party made the claim and blockaded Bangkok intersections for months to show its anger, but, bizarrely, it then refused to take part in the election to settle the matter.
The most telling image from the election was the sight of opposition activists padlocking shut the gates to polling booths, preventing citizens from casting a vote. About one in 10 voting stations were blocked by the opposition, according to the Thai electoral commission.
''They wouldn't contest the election because they said it was illegitimate, and they said it was illegitimate because they weren't participating in it - it's a circular argument,'' says an expert on Thailand, the ANU's Professor Andrew Walker.
So why would the Democrats refuse to participate?
Simple. Because they weren't going to win. They haven't won an election in two decades. The party of the city-based elites and the military brass has no idea how to compete with Yingluck's Pheu Thai Party, the party of the farmers and the rural masses in a country where 40 per cent of the labour force works the land.
''The Democrats have been unable to respond to the fundamental changes in rural Thailand of rising incomes are rising expectations,'' says Walker, ''so they use every other tactic to pursue power.''
This is the fundamental problem. One half of the political system refuses to respect the will of the people. The Democrats are profoundly undemocratic. They have sworn to blockade the capital and disrupt the government to press their case for the removal of Yingluck Shinawatra.
They demand that she hand power to an unelected ''people's council.'' She cannot convene parliament because of a law that demands at least 95 per cent of seats are filled; by disrupting the election, the Democrats have denied the parliament the minimum it needs to function.
Yingluck remains caretaker Prime Minister and will try to re-run the election in the disrupted areas where 6 million Thais were denied their right to vote.
Eight years of political turmoil, the latest convulsion of a 40-year democratic dysfunction, are set to continue. One of the big questions in Bangkok is whether the military will stage a coup, as it has 18 times since the establishment of Thailand as a constitutional monarchy in 1932.
The expert consensus is no, but that was also the expert consensus just before the army took power in 2006. Even if it doesn't, the army is wielding enormous power behind the scenes. Yingluck's government is reportedly in secret negotiations with former senior army officers to try to find a solution.
''Thailand's weak point is politics,'' said a former governor of the country's central bank, the Bank of Thailand, Pridiyathorn Devakula. ''If we have political stability, we will be ahead of other ASEAN nations. But that's a big 'if'.'' Sadly for such a well endowed land and Australia's eighth-biggest trading partner, it seems an increasingly forlorn hope. Why is it so?
The immediate cause is the Democrats' rage. They, like most of the Thai elites and the army hierarchy, are incandescent at the persistence of the power and popularity of Yingluck's brother, Thaksin Shinawatra. It is her brother, their family, that is the target.
The billionaire populist Thaksin was elected prime minister in 2001. His pro-rural-poor policies, his centralisation and personalisation of power, his authoritarian tendencies, his spurning of the elites was bad enough. The fact Thaksin won a second election overwhelmingly was just too much and the army drove him out of power and out of the country, where he remains to escape arrest on a charge of corruption. He unwisely said that he would continue to rule through his sister, whom he called his ''clone.''
Thaksin levelled the electrifying accusation that senior counsellors to the the King of Thailand had been complicit in allowing the coup, drawing the monarch's name into the fray. In a country where the king is revered, and where you can be jailed for 15 years for criticising him, this was extraordinary. It was also true.
Much evidence supports the claim. And this brings us to one of the overarching factors in explaining Thailand's democratic dyslexia. The monarchy ''had at best a mixed record supporting democracy, and hasn't allowed a fully democratic political system to emerge,'' says David Streckfuss, an American researcher based in Cambodia.
The king may not have prevented a democratic ethos from emerging, but many of those who claim a superior right to override democracy do so in his name.
''Thailand has largely accommodated military interventionism, especially by accepting the defence of the monarchy as a justification for toppling elected governments,'' writes Nicholas Farrelly, another ANU expert on Thailand.
''Thailand's elite and, to some extent, the public as well have deeply internalised the ultimate acceptability of coups. The test of this arrangement may come with the end of King Bhumibol Adulyadej's reign and the potential realignment of military influence in Thai society.''
That test is drawing near. The king is 86 and ailing. It will be a threshold moment for Thailand.
Peter Hartcher is the international editor.
No comments:
Post a Comment