08:33
Tieng Anh Vui
BY MID-AFTERNOON on December 9th the leader of Thailand’s would-be revolution, Suthep Thaugsuban, was celebrating the capture of Bangkok’s government district from atop a makeshift stage. Before him the prime minister’s office stood closed and empty, surrounded by over 100,000 of his devoted followers. Just a handful of soldiers were left to guard the perimeter gates. After a month of mounting protests, Mr Suthep had asked for a big turnout for one last push to oust the government—and he got it.
Mr Suthep refers to the government as the “Thaksin regime”. The prime minister is Yingluck Shinawatra, but the power behind her is Thaksin Shinawatra, her elder brother, who was ousted as prime minister in 2006 in an army coup. Since Ms Ying
luck came to office in a landslide in 2011, he has called the shots from self-imposed exile in Dubai. Yet now Ms Yingluck’s grip looks distinctly shaky. Even before the protesters seized the entire government district, she announced that she would dissolve parliament and call an election, for February 2nd; her hope was to persuade the anti-government protesters to go home. “Let the people decide the direction of the country and who the governing majority will be,” she said in a televised address on December 8th. It was not sufficient to appease the fiery Mr Suthep.
With the crowds at his back, Mr Suthep (pictured, above, at bottom-centre) insists that Ms Yingluck should not even stay on as caretaker prime minister until the election. He says that she and her government must resign to make way for his own “people’s council” of “decent men” who would draw up measures to wipe all influence of the Shinawatra clan from Thai politics. Some of Mr Suthep’s street-fighting men even want Ms Yingluck to leave the country altogether, joining her brother in exile. (He faces two years in prison for corruption and abuse of power should he return.) Mr Suthep has invited all in the civil service to work with him to set up, in effect, an alternative government. All his “orders” (as he calls them) and demands amount to little less than an attempted coup.
Ms Yingluck insists that she will remain in office until the election. But Mr Suthep’s uncompromising ferocity has plainly rattled her. She is a relative novice in the turbulent world of Thai politics, never having held public office before being picked by her brother to lead his Pheu Thai party to victory in the 2011 elections. In a speech on December 10th she seemed almost tearful as she defended both herself and her family, saying plaintively that she had “backed down to the point where I don’t know how to back down any further.”
Yet if Ms Yingluck is going wobbly, her core “red shirt” supporters, those thousands of activists loyal to Mr Thaksin, certainly are not. They have vowed to defend the democratically elected government. There are plans, should Ms Yingluck fall, to move the government to the red-shirt heartlands in the north and north-east as a counterweight to Mr Suthep’s insurrection in the capital and the south. That would further entrench the bitter divisions between the two parts of the country, divisions that some argue have now made Thailand virtually ungovernable.
But if Ms Yingluck can make it through to next year, she knows that she has a good chance of winning a fresh mandate at the polls. Indeed, a chief reason why Mr Suthep and his allies do not accept an election as the way out of the impasse is that they would probably lose. After all, the Pheu Thai party and its earlier incarnations, all led by Mr Thaksin or his retainers, have won the last five general elections, the latest by a big margin. For however vast the anti-government crowds are in Bangkok and certain southern Thai cities, out in the populous rural north and north-east it is a different story. There Mr Thaksin and his party long ago captured the votes of millions of relatively poor rice farmers, and they have been stacking up the parliamentary majorities ever since.
By contrast, the opposition Democrat Party to which Mr Suthep belongs has a dismal record at the polls. His people try to argue that somehow all the victories of the Thaksin parties have been bought, with “bribes” of lavish public spending on rice farmers, among others. Yet precious little evidence suggests the elections were systematically rigged.
Much now hangs on how the Democrats respond to Ms Yingluck’s call for an election. Their MPs resigned en masse on December 8th to join the protests (eight of their number, including Mr Suthep, had already done so a month earlier, in order to lead the demonstrations). The Democrats claim that parliament has abused its power and is now illegitimate, for instance because it attempted to introduce a fully elected senate, as well as an amnesty bill designed chiefly to allow Mr Thaksin back. Now they have to decide whether to throw in their lot with the protesters completely, or to contest the election.
One senior Democrat (and former foreign minister), Kasit Piromya, argues that the party “cannot avoid the election, as a democratic party”. Others may not agree; after all, the party has boycotted an election before, in 2006. If the Democrats do not take part, it would doubtless undermine the credibility of their opponents’ victory. But it would deal yet another blow to democracy in Thailand, already in a precarious state.
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