It’s not just about Thaksin

Written by Writer on Friday, October 10th, 2008

It’s not just about Thaksin

A Thai businessman, who is close to the inner circles of the ruling People Power Party (PPP), could not help cracking a joke as he glanced at the vast panorama of Bangkok below his office.

“I have to leave,” he said. “I have a meeting at the Stock Exchange - on how to attract foreign investors to Thailand.”

He roared with laughter at his own joke. But it was tinged with bitterness.

Thailand is in what one newspaper yesterday called a “perfect storm”, buffeted by the global financial turmoil and a long-drawn and increasingly vicious domestic power struggle that has rendered the government rudderless when what is needed most is stability and sound policy.

Already one prime minister has fallen to the long and debilitating test of wills between the government and the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), which sees the present leadership as a proxy of ousted premier Thaksin Shinawatra.

The present incumbent, Somchai Wongsawat, was able to enter Parliament House this week to make a speech only with the help of a phalanx of policemen firing tear gas.

Meanwhile, the economy is wilting. Yesterday, the government said it was seeking a US$1.5 billion (S$2.2 billion) loan from the likes of the World Bank.

The PAD “is trying to destabilise us so we can’t have effective government”, said the businessman. “Officials don’t know whether to listen to ministers because they think the government isn’t going to last anyway.

“We have no strategy, no long-term outlook. We just know we have got to have elections, but we need a modicum of peace so that the election is not strewn with problems,” he added.

“But whoever is backing the PAD seems not to mind if the entire house burns down.”

Byzantine party politics and interference from multiple power centres are dragging Thailand into a maelstrom. Who will survive and in what shape the country will be in when all this is over is almost impossible to predict.

The degree of violence during this week’s street battles - one policeman was deliberately run over by a PAD supporter in a truck - underscores the potential dangers ahead.

Perhaps the strongest impression one carries away from the PAD’s protests is the utter conviction of its supporters in the righteousness of its cause.

For them the movement is a moral crusade against corruption. This unswerving belief can prove dangerously blinding as evidenced by a woman supporter who complained after Tuesday’s violence that the police had no reason to use tear gas because the protesters were armed with plastic hand clappers.

She may have genuinely missed - or chosen not to see - the hundreds armed with baseball bats, iron rods, slingshots, and lately, guns and homemade “ping pong ball bombs”.

And this, despite the movement’s insistence that it is non-violent.

She, like the thousands of others who put up with the discomfort of their months-long occupation of Government House, is in the front line of an epochal struggle to define and control the future of Thailand.

The PAD is supported by a large section of Bangkok’s middle-class intelligentsia, which, combined with backing from powerful players, including factions in the military, has allowed it a degree of immunity.

Given this, the government is not entirely sure who the army is backing. Public comments about the role of the army make it clear that the PAD expects it to side with “the people” - a euphemism for the movement.

But the PAD, despite the 10 million or so who watch its propaganda arm - co-leader Sondhi Limthongkul’s ASTV cable channel - remains a minority in a country of 63 million, in which some 14 million voted last December for the PPP.

However most of the PPP’s support is not from Bangkok but from the relatively poor, rural masses upcountry.

So the PAD may be a minority but its message resonates in Bangkok, which with a population of only around 10 million, accounts for up to 70 per cent of Thailand’s gross domestic product.

And it is the capital’s elite - the bureaucrats, the military, and the monarchy - who have called the shots in Thailand for generations.

The PPP has another handicap: With most of its best men banned or disqualified by the courts, the current Cabinet does not have much credibility, and the Prime Minister himself is tainted by his association with Thaksin, who is his brother-in-law.

Few disagree that corruption was rife under Thaksin. His style was authoritarian and he condoned human rights abuses. But the current political upheaval is about much more than the ousted premier and his associates. It is also a response to the forces he unleashed.

The PAD wants to turn back the clock that was set ticking by Thaksin’s cultivation of the grassroots through populist policies, which he parlayed into votes.

Most analysts agree that the PAD is ultimately an instrument of the upper class elite, who view this pro-Thaksin constituency with both disdain and apprehension.

The PAD claims to be defending the monarchy. Co-leader Sondhi said in an interview last month that the political reforms that his movement demands must be in place before the royal succession.

King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Thailand’s beloved monarch and ultimate moral authority, will be 81 this year, and Thais worry about a future in which his stabilising influence will be absent.

“There is an inherent contradiction: We want to be a democracy but we want to preserve the neo-feudal structure,” said Professor Thitinan Pongsudhirak, who teaches international political economy at Chulalongkorn University.

In a recent paper published in the Journal Of Democracy, Prof Thitinan wrote that there will be ebbs and flows but “most likely no denouement until after the ageing and revered monarch passes from the scene”.

For the PPP’s ideologues, sure of their mass support from the north and north-east, it is a waiting game.

And yet in this game of high-stakes political chess, they cannot afford to sit still while the other pieces manoeuvre around the King. The game is not over by far, and more pieces are likely to fall before the end.