Thai junta manoeuvres to stay in the game
By Michael Peel in Bangkok
Thailand’s military rulers seem to be getting into the spirit of the US Open tennis championships this week with a new road-map to elections they call 6-4 6-4. Each figure is the number of months the various stages of the journey are scheduled to take. So polling day is now the best part of two years away, a timeframe further extended thanks to a weekend vote by the generals’ handpicked National Reform Council to reject a contentious draft new constitution.
But it is far from game, set and match to the junta, whose main priority seems to be extending its now 15-month rule for as long as possible with the appearance of process. Last month’s Bangkok bombing — and the erratic official response to it — showed the limits to the generals’ control. Continued subdued growth in what was once one of Southeast Asia’s great “tiger” economies is also giving them reason to sweat.
The fate of the constitution was a sign of how the generals will always struggle to be truly totalitarian, despite their occasionally draconian actions. Tradition and presentation demanded they win some form of wider consent in a kingdom that has embraced electoral democracy in theory, if not always in practice.
The draft constitution had been widely criticised as an example of “father-knows-best” government, empowering bureaucrats and the officer class at the expense of elected politicians. It might have even have been voted down in a referendum due on it later. So the junta dodged that bullet — and, as a bonus, formally prolonged its tenure, which some think was its real intention all along.
But the improvisational way the debate unfolded fed a wider sense that the top brass in the main ministries are more cute tacticians than master strategists. Their broad-ranging security crackdown since the coup in May last year has stifled domestic dissent, but it did not stop the bomb that killed 20 people, 14 of them foreigners, at a shrine in central Bangkok on August 17.
The suspects detained and arrest warrants issued since increasingly suggest the attack is linked to Bangkok’s much-criticised deportation in July of more than 100 members of the Uighur minority to China, where they are in conflict with the government. The sense is growing, as Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, put it in an article published this week, that the “chickens have come home to roost” after an “excessive kowtow to China’s demands”.
On the stuttering economy, the generals have tacitly acknowledged error by sweeping away the team they appointed after the coup. In a demonstration of a strong pragmatic streak, they have just drafted in Somkid Jatusripitak, a former finance minister. Mr Somkid served in the government of Thaksin Shinawatra, the military’s bête noire and brother of Yingluck Shinawatra, premier in the administration ousted by the coup. Having railed against the Shinawatras’ “populist” policies such as cheap healthcare, rice subsidies and rural microcredit, the junta has now brought in a main author of “Thaksinomics”.
Looming above all these manoeuvres is the frail figure of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world’s longest-ruling monarch. The palace said this week that the 87-year-old head of state was recovering from a blood infection, the latest in a series of illnesses. The future balance of power once his accumulated 69 years of semi-divine personal authority disappears is the great unknown for all sides, which is the main reason many observers think the military is so keen to stay.
Junta rule has so far done little to address, still less resolve, the power struggles that have driven nine years of periodically violent political conflict in Thailand, both between classes and within the military and bureaucratic elite. The post-coup ad hoc rule has left the country struggling to respond coherently to the big economic, political and security challenges it faces. The generals’ lead may still appear commanding for now — but this might yet be one match they never close out.
Source: Financial Time
September 10, 2015Thailand’s military rulers seem to be getting into the spirit of the US Open tennis championships this week with a new road-map to elections they call 6-4 6-4. Each figure is the number of months the various stages of the journey are scheduled to take. So polling day is now the best part of two years away, a timeframe further extended thanks to a weekend vote by the generals’ handpicked National Reform Council to reject a contentious draft new constitution.
But it is far from game, set and match to the junta, whose main priority seems to be extending its now 15-month rule for as long as possible with the appearance of process. Last month’s Bangkok bombing — and the erratic official response to it — showed the limits to the generals’ control. Continued subdued growth in what was once one of Southeast Asia’s great “tiger” economies is also giving them reason to sweat.
The fate of the constitution was a sign of how the generals will always struggle to be truly totalitarian, despite their occasionally draconian actions. Tradition and presentation demanded they win some form of wider consent in a kingdom that has embraced electoral democracy in theory, if not always in practice.
The draft constitution had been widely criticised as an example of “father-knows-best” government, empowering bureaucrats and the officer class at the expense of elected politicians. It might have even have been voted down in a referendum due on it later. So the junta dodged that bullet — and, as a bonus, formally prolonged its tenure, which some think was its real intention all along.
But the improvisational way the debate unfolded fed a wider sense that the top brass in the main ministries are more cute tacticians than master strategists. Their broad-ranging security crackdown since the coup in May last year has stifled domestic dissent, but it did not stop the bomb that killed 20 people, 14 of them foreigners, at a shrine in central Bangkok on August 17.
The suspects detained and arrest warrants issued since increasingly suggest the attack is linked to Bangkok’s much-criticised deportation in July of more than 100 members of the Uighur minority to China, where they are in conflict with the government. The sense is growing, as Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, put it in an article published this week, that the “chickens have come home to roost” after an “excessive kowtow to China’s demands”.
On the stuttering economy, the generals have tacitly acknowledged error by sweeping away the team they appointed after the coup. In a demonstration of a strong pragmatic streak, they have just drafted in Somkid Jatusripitak, a former finance minister. Mr Somkid served in the government of Thaksin Shinawatra, the military’s bête noire and brother of Yingluck Shinawatra, premier in the administration ousted by the coup. Having railed against the Shinawatras’ “populist” policies such as cheap healthcare, rice subsidies and rural microcredit, the junta has now brought in a main author of “Thaksinomics”.
Looming above all these manoeuvres is the frail figure of King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world’s longest-ruling monarch. The palace said this week that the 87-year-old head of state was recovering from a blood infection, the latest in a series of illnesses. The future balance of power once his accumulated 69 years of semi-divine personal authority disappears is the great unknown for all sides, which is the main reason many observers think the military is so keen to stay.
Junta rule has so far done little to address, still less resolve, the power struggles that have driven nine years of periodically violent political conflict in Thailand, both between classes and within the military and bureaucratic elite. The post-coup ad hoc rule has left the country struggling to respond coherently to the big economic, political and security challenges it faces. The generals’ lead may still appear commanding for now — but this might yet be one match they never close out.
