Opinions | Columnists
Holding Thailand hostage
PAD's actions have crippled the economy and undermined its democratic institutions.
- By Thitinan Pongsudhirak, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 23:16 December 3, 2008
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As its illegal takeover of Government House over the past three months has proved unsuccessful in blackmailing the government into resignation, the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) has upped the ante by occupying Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi and Don Mueang international airports and forcing their closures over the past week. In doing so, the PAD has demonstrated its intention to achieve its aims at all costs, as the airport closures have brought the Thai economy to its knees.
Alarmingly, the PAD is bent on creating the conditions of ungovernability in Thailand and then to demand the ouster of Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat on grounds that Thailand is ungovernable. Its tactics have warped into a blatant street campaign of intimidation and fear, of coercion and force. That the PAD has been able to bully its way up to this point is attributable to its powerful backing, without which its relative impunity in the face of fragrant violations of the law can hardly be explained.
The PAD's latest antic at Bangkok's airports will likely narrow its support base, especially in Bangkok as the capital reels from the longer-term impact of the airport closure to business confidence, but its remaining columns will still be deep in their resolve to get their way. What the PAD wants has not changed. After an unsuccessful bid to promote its "new politics", it first demanded the ouster of former prime minister Samak Sundaravej earlier this year, it is now after Prime Minister Somchai.
The PAD's game plan is sophisticated but simple. It has to clear the slate of government, led by the People's Power Party (PPP), and get past this elected government in order to reach its destination. As a result, the PAD has bayed for blood, openly inviting a military coup in order to bring up an interim administration. Its ultimate objective is to refashion the rules of the democratic game to guarantee elite representation in the elected parliament through partial appointments.
Populist agenda
Its logic is simple. A one-man, one-vote democratic system will indefinitely return the same parliamentary faces with a similar populist policy agenda that has appealed to the vast majority of the electorate in northeast and the north, who voted for deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his disbanded Thai Rak Thai party for six years and for Samak and Somchai and PPP more recently.
Unsurprisingly, the PAD has openly shown disdain for these rural constituencies as faceless and gullible vote-sellers who should not be counted on equal terms with the PAD's urban minority in Thailand's electorate. To the PAD, the more the lower house is appointed, the better. This explains its desperate manoeuvres to find an extra-parliamentary outcome by seizing Government House and Bangkok's airports.
But the PAD faces an uphill task in resetting the political environment and realising its anti-democratic agenda. Somehow it would have to dislodge the PPP and perhaps its successor, the Puea Thai party from elected power, and to keep them out.
This interim, caretaker period would allow the PAD to either rewrite the current constitution or come up with an entirely new charter. The PAD's cadres would assert themselves in charter alterations. But in an age when democratic rule is an emerging norm of the international community, when information is more widely accessible due to new technologies, any anti-democratic movement will be hard-pressed to get away with elite dominance.
Yet the PAD has shown that it is willing to go all the way. Only its backers can pull the plug on it, but they may now be too insecure and paranoid to go back. The longer this crisis goes on, the more exposed and compromised the PAD's backers have become. While the stakes are high with wide and deep longer-term damages, it is not too late for PAD's backers to rein in this rabid and reckless movement or to pull its plug altogether.
- OpinionAsia, 2006 - 2008
Thitinan Pongsudhirak is Directorof the Institute of Security and International Studies, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok.
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