Saturday Extra

On December 23rd Thai voters will go to the polls.

Thailand was once seen as a beacon of democracy in South East Asia.

But more recently military coups, allegations of government corruption and increasing reports of human rights violations have greatly weakened the country's democratic base.

So how important is this election for the future of democracy in Thailand?

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Geraldine Doogue: Thailand, it's a favourite holiday destination for thousands of Australians, and the beaches and the good food are well-known. Few of us follow the politics of this country, though if you're a regular listener, you'll know that Saturday Extra has tried to keep a watching brief.

At the moment, Thais are celebrating the 80th birthday of their revered king, and the country will vote in a general election just before Christmas. Now it's possible that a new government could include the party of the exiled former Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawat. The military of course, are opposed to Taxin ever returning to office, so the stakes are high.

Thailand was once seen as a beacon of democracy in South East Asia, but more recently, military coups, allegations of government corruption and increasing reports of human rights violations, have greatly weakened that country's democratic base.

So how important is this election for the future of democracy in Thailand? Is it indeed, at a tipping point?

Dr Michael Connors is a lecturer at La Trobe University, and he's the author of 'Democracy and National Identity in Thailand'. He joins me now. Good morning.

Michael Connors: Good morning.

Geraldine Doogue: Look, it can be difficult to grasp, politics in Thailand, it's a bit of a labyrinth. Maybe we could just recap. Last year the military seized power from the Prime Minister, Mr Taxin; it accused him of corruption, he exited the country and remains in exile as it were, in London, but he still remains popular, from what I read. What is it about him that appeals to so many voters?

Michael Connors: If we could answer that, we'd help the military in Thailand because they're really trying to get rid of his popularity. I think the answer to that question is simply that his government, which was overturning the military coup last year in September, was amongst the first in living memory to genuinely deliver policies on the ground that made a concrete difference to people's lives. I'm talking about things such as universal health care for 39 baht (about $1) I'm talking about debt moratorium; micro crediting abilities. In other words, this was the government that went directly to the people on the ground, and seriously implemented with great haste, policies that they'd promised on the election.

Geraldine Doogue: So in other words it was like the welfare state arriving and it was delivered by a father figure type.

Michael Connors: A very limited welfare state, kind of a safety valve welfare state. But not so much welfare as in kind of investments to allow small farmers, small businesses to get up and running. So a kind of entrepreneurial state with a bit of state intervention and easing the money flow in rural areas where banks were reluctant to put money.

Geraldine Doogue: It also of course was like a right-wing populism wasn't it, in some ways? Because he had all sorts of links in with authoritarian parts of the nation, and there were some dreadful human rights abuses at the time, particularly the cleaning out of what was perceived to be the underclass, the drug underclass in the cities and of course the efforts against the Islamist insurgency in the south.

Michael Connors: Yes, there's a lot in this term 'authoritarian populism' and I won't try and unpack it all. I would describe it as a right-wing form of popularism. He responded to poor peoples' needs in a kind of gimmicky and targeted way without restructuring the political economy of Thailand. So the rich remained rich, the poor remained poor, but there's a certain redistribution of income that gives people reason to hope in his government, or his past government. Now at the same time as doing that, there was the rather ugly underbelly of the government which was as you say, human rights abuses, we're talking about 2-1/2-thousand people were killed in a 3-month period in 2003, in what amounted to extra judicial killings of people alleged to have been involved in drug trafficking. Now there's lots of horror stories emerging about many innocent people on blacklists, neighbours would go to police and say 'I don't like this person, they're involved in drug dealing', and they'd find themselves shot. Down the south of course human rights abuses were rife, disappeared people who were on blacklists alleged to be militants in the insurgency and so on. At the same time you're talking about a government that moves against the checks and balances on itself. It infiltrated things such as the Electoral Commission of Thailand, or it stacked independent agencies of the State which were supposed to scrutinise its exercise of power, and closed them down effectively.

Geraldine Doogue: Now Taxin remains an exile in the UK, and he is quite an extraordinary man. I mean among other things he's the owner now of the Manchester Football Club, but his allies have formed the PPP, the People's Power Party, which is led by a Mr Samak and indeed he's quite associated with these alleged human rights abuses isn't he? What do we know about him?

Michael Connors: Sumak, who may become the next Prime Minister if the polls are believed, although don't be surprised if he wins the election and then he's overthrown internally within the People's Power Party. Sumak goes back a long time in Thai politics. He was on the extreme right in the 1970s, he's alleged to have been involved in stirring up a grouping of people, village scouts and so forth, who were involved in a massacre of students in Bangkok at a university in 1976. Since then his political career has been to the right of Thai politics. He won the governorship of Bangkok, and has a strong political base in Bangkok, and it's interesting that Taxin's old power base, the politicians who want to return to power under the name of People's Power Party, which is really an incarnation of Thaksin's old party, they've chosen him to lead the party, and when he was given the leadership a couple of months ago, he announced very openly that he was a nominee of Taxin and his key policies would be to continue the popular policies of the Taxin government, but also to create an amnesty of sorts to allow Taxin to return to Thailand, and also to revive the fortunes of about 100 Tyrak Thai executives who were banned from politics for five years

Geraldine Doogue: Now of course the military are opposed to his return, so where do we head from here? I mean quite serious possibilities that you've sketched there for Thai society.

Michael Connors: It's not a pleasant picture because there's not nice sides to choose from really. People looking for a simple authoritarian versus democratic equation won't find it at the moment in Thailand. What I imagine for the military is first of all don't imagine the military a monolithic unit who are entirely opposed to Taxin. One of the reasons the military, or sections of the military moved against Taxin, was that he was creating a network within the military from about 2001 onwards for five years, that would be his support base in the military. And that was built at the expense of an old power network around the chief Privy Councillor, who was an old General who has links with the military. So there were two competing factions in the military. Now the understanding that makes it possible to imagine some kind of compromise, that if the military faces a resurgent People's Power Party, in other words, Taxin's re-emergence, some may be willing to do a deal; others may not. So yes, a great deal of uncertainty can be expected.

Geraldine Doogue: My guest on Saturday Extra is Dr Michael Connors, who's a lecturer at La Trobe University, and we're talking about Thai politics. Isn't it the case that the new constitution was designed by the military after they came to power by a coup, to bar the return of a strong one-party government, so that we've actually got a designed-to-be-complicated result, likely to come from this pre-election?

Michael Connors: Yes. In 1997, Thailand passed a new constitution which was widely hailed as liberal and democratic, but I had in place articles that provided for a very strong executive government, and it's those articles that Taxin used to clamp down on scrutiny and checks and balances. So now the new constitution that, you're right, was promulgated really under a civilian but military-backed regime, the new constitution is designed to weaken the premiership. So for instance it's easy to launch no confidence motions, it's easier to impeach, you should recall that Taxin in his five years of office never had to face a no-confidence motion because the Opposition didn't have enough votes in parliament. So they've attempted to create a weaker government that may depend on coalition partners.

Geraldine Doogue: But you need a very sophisticated democracy like Holland's to deal with that. I mean even Italy has struggled with that, France struggled with it after the war.

Michael Connors: It's come down to Thais saying do they want a strong authoritarian government, or do they want a weak coalition kind of government settlement. That's not just the option of course because if you have a weak coalition government, then that enhances the power of the enjoying bureaucracy and the military, and indeed the new constitution provides for the bureaucracy and the military to sit in the Senate as appointed senators.

Geraldine Doogue: Let's say a weak coalition government does emerge. Do you think that they will wrestle with the power of the military?

Michael Connors: You know, whoever comes to power, the two power blocs who are likely to get the most seats are the Democrat Party, a Liberal Democratic Party, and the People's Power, the right-wing populist party of Taxin, or Taxin's nominee Semak. It's expected they will have to combine with two or three minor parties to form government. Now they're weakened because they have to come to terms with Coalition parties. That will be a solution that the military will feel reasonably protects them from any revenge for launching the coup because the moment you've got more bargaining partners in the government, the less likely the government is going to be able to move against the military. This is the great fear now to the military, that if Semak does win office and the People's Power Party wins office, there will be retributions for the coup of 2006.

Geraldine Doogue: Just very quickly, tell us about the Democrat Party, the opposition party, because it was the one that got all those people out into the streets, this is what we did cover on Saturday Extra, and the rural people didn't come into town, interestingly enough, because there was great worry at the time that there could be a pitched battle, and that didn't really happen, and this was regarded as a sort of real statement by city Thais that they were sick of corrupt politics. And they lost some clout or legitimacy in the intervening time.

Michael Connors: People like to understand Thai politics as it's called The Two Tales of Democracy. One is rural, and one is urban, and what you've sketched there is the so-called urban elite rising up against an authoritarian corrupt government, and ignoring the fact that it was immensely popular in rural areas, and indeed, going so far as to support a military coup to suspend electoral democracy in order to reformulate the constitution and create new democratic forms of rule.

Now the Democrat party have a kind of compromised history of working with military regimes but also trying to broaden political space in Thai politics. But it's very much an elite party. It kind of embraces liberal economic policy, and it's very much an urban based party, and its leader, Abhisit, is considered to be something of an aristocrat. In recent times, they've tried to copy the populist policies of Taxin, and at the same time claim that while they will do that, they will maintain liberal democratic forms of rule. But they are tainted; they are probably strongly despised in the poor areas of Thailand in the north-east where Taxin has his power base, because effectively they said that the people's vote didn't matter, and they've been giving qualified support to the military coup, they more or less robbed the north-east of a government that north-east at times felt it was its own.

Geraldine Doogue: Very interesting. Look, thank you so much; I know you're going to be an informal observer of this election aren't you, so that will be a great challenge I assume?

Michael Connors: It will be.

Geraldine Doogue: Good luck.

Michael Connors: Thank you very much.

Geraldine Doogue: Dr Michael Connors, and he teaches at La Trobe University.

Guests

Dr Michael Connors
La Trobe University

Story Researcher and Producer

Julie Browning