THAILAND’S MERRY-GO-ROUND POLITICS: WHEN IS A SPENT FORCE NOT A SPENT FORCE?

In the event he went quickly and quietly. On August 14th one minute Srettha Thavisin was Prime Minister, the next he was not. Such was the upshot of a ruling by Thailand’s powerful Constitutional Court, rubber stamped by the Senate (the legislature’s unelected upper house), that he should be removed from office. Simultaneously it was ruled his entire cabinet should also resign. The main charge was that one of his ministers, a lawyer, had done time in prison on a corruption rap.

(Since 1932, when the Thai monarchy was forced to surrender its absolutism, there have been twenty new constitutions and constitutional charters. Most usually, a new constitution is promulgated in the wake of a military coup and underwrites the political primacy of the armed forces, The current constitution, effected in 2017, follows this pattern, authorising the Constitutional Court to maintain and enforce the laws and rules it sets out.)

Standing in the street outside, Srettha (in Thailand politicians are known by their given, not their family, names) protested his innocence, but said he would abide by the decision.

Less than a week later, on August 18th, Srettha made another public appearance, at a formal ceremony to confirm his replacement as prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra. Dressed in a tailored sandy coloured suit he was caught on camera smiling down avuncularly at the woman who was now leader of his Pheu Thai (‘For Thais’) party to boot. Paetongtarn (‘Golden Stream Raft’) wore brilliant white clothing, as did her father Thaksin ‘Squareface’ Shinawatra, beaming with pleasure at his daughter’s elevation. The event seemed more like a wedding than a serious matter of state.

Thus the turning of the political merry-go-round that Thai politics has become. The Shinawatras were back in apparent power courtesy a judicial putsch backed by the military, represented in the Senate.

Paetongtarn – Thailand’s second female prime minister and its youngest ever -- was new to national politics, having gained a seat in the National Assembly for the first time in a general election held in March 2023.  Commentators were quick to seize upon her inexperience. While it is true she had taken a degree in political science at Bangkok’s prestigious Chulalongkorn university, that had been followed by an MSc in hotel management at Surrey University in England. Thereafter she pursued a career in actual hotel management, running a hotel chain owned by Shincorp, a multi-billion dollar outfit owned by the Shinawatra family.

Srettha soon appointed her to a couple of relatively unimportant parliamentary committees, and she had been made a member of another committee charged with orchestrating King Vajiralongkorn’s 72nd birthday celebrations, taking place on July 28th this year. But, that she had not previously held high office mattered not. It was the fact of being a Shinawatra that sealed the deal. Here candidacy for the prime-ministership was uncontested by any other candidate in the lower house and she was elected with only two abstentions.

This remarkable statistic came about because, on the same day that Srettha was ousted, the main opposition party (Forward Movement) was dissolved by the Constitutional Court.

The key figure in all this is Paetongtarn’s dad, Thaksin. In 2001 this ultra-populist swept to power at the leader of the party he himself had founded in 1998, Thai Rak Thai (‘Thais Love Thais’), best described as a national front with lipstick.

The fact that TRT had been founded on Bastille Day encouraged speculation that Thaksin was an anti-monarchist wanting to create a presidential form of government. But for all that Thaksin had won power legitimately in an election, the royalist establishment reacted with horror. In a while there were demonstrations by ‘Yellow Shirts’, organised mainly by the right-of-centre Democrat Party, whose very existence now seemed threatened.

In response, Thaksinite ‘Red Shirts’ came out in force, and for over a year there was turmoil on Bangkok’s streets. There was some violence, some deaths and a great deal of unpleasantness, until, in 2006 the army staged a coup, as it had done several times before since WW2. As the military assumed control of the state the National Assembly was dissolved and Thaksin, fearing a lengthy prison sentence, fled into voluntary exile.

Thaksin was out, but not down. From abroad, whether in Dubai or Hong Kong, he continued to pull political levers, and sure enough, as the military eventually fulfilled its pledge to restore democratic elections, Thaksin saw to it that his henchman Somchai Wongsawat, who had married into the Shinawatra family, became Prime Minister, in 2008.

Somchai survived less than fifty days, before he too was kicked out by the Constitutional Court. Simultaneously his Thaksinite ‘People’s Power’ party was disbanded.

Undaunted, Thaksin next engineered the election of his own sister, Yingluk Shinawatra, to the prime-ministership in 2011, at the head of Pheu Thai, a reincarnation of Thaksin’s original TRT.

Patently Yingluk was her brother’s puppet, with no proper policies of her own, and little political sensitivity. When Bangkok was hit by massive floods in 2012, she caused a scandal by visiting those worst affected wearing stylish designer boots that showed off her shapely thighs to what she thought was her advantage, But she managed to hold on to power until 2014, when she too was dismissed by the Constitutional Court for financial misconduct.

Yet no attempt was made to quash Pheu Thai. Notwithstanding, the Constitutional Court had emerged as a surefire way of containing the Shinawatra dynasty, and for a while the protracted struggle between the vested interests of the establishment and a shameless chancer had been resolved in the former’s favour. In time, Thaksin opted to return home to Thailand, where, in a brokered deal he spent a short spell in jail. People thought he had abandoned his ambitions, but of course, as this August’s events demonstrate, he hadn’t.

Inevitably the question is: how long can Paetongtarn last before she too is brought down by collusive royalists, judges and the military?

The answer is quite possibly rather longer than some predict. The reason for this? A dramatic change to the political landscape was effected in the general election of March 2023, when the relatively new, left-wing Forward Movement party gained more votes even than Pheu Thai.

Launched to appeal to younger voters particularly, Forward Movement seeks a new constitution, aimed at embedding actual democracy, and several other reforms, including the abolition of draconian laws that make lese-majeste a severely punishable crime. Only a coalition of other parties, including Pheu Thai, prevented Forward Movement from assuming power.

The Shinawatra dynasty no longer the establishment’s number one enemy, but has been co-opted as a political ally. My enemy’s enemy is my friend and all of that. And the signs are that Thaksin himself, now aged 75, has mellowed into a conservatism of his own. He no more wants Forward Movement to succeed than the Democrat Party or the military do. And so a new alignment has been forged.

Whether my prediction is correct only time will tell. What can be said more surely is that Thailand will remain effectively a militocracy, not least because of the widespread support for the army among the better-off and other stakeholders in a traditional social compact that still robustly pertains.