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ชวนอ่าน
https://www.asiasentinel.com/politics/why-democracy-failed-thailand/?fbclid=IwAR0wLruv1e7Lq0BTawNDaSneu_zah8f1ZnE3gDREntoJTq1GpgyRpRzWzSo
The military and the elite establishment want to maintain their stranglehold on power at the expense of the people and elected politicians.
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Military coups, 17 in all, have been staged with the sole purpose of usurping people’s power that could not be obtained by democratic means. Corruption, instability, insurgency, and mismanagement have often been cited as the pretexts for the coups. The new Thai army chief, who just assumed office on October 1 this year, was unequivocal when he said that he would stage a military coup for the reasons mentioned above.
Although military coups are never out of fashion in Thailand, the pressure exerted by the Thai people and the international community has forced the military to engage the paralegals, or ‘neti borikorn’ in Thai language, to craft a constitution and enabling laws that would minimize electoral gains by the democratic camp in the general elections and ensure the victory of the junta-nominated parties and, hence, the continuity of semi-authoritarianism.
As Thailand is gearing up for a general election scheduled for February, the junta, which came to power through 2014 military coup that toppled the legally-elected government of Yingluck Shinawatra, has made a head start by allowing junta-nominated political parties to be formed to contest in the election with the aim of supporting the ambitions of the junta leader, currently the prime minister, to serve another tenure as an elected prime minister.
If the junta can pull off a victory at the polls or successfully manipulate post-election parliamentary process, Thailand will have a constitutionally acquired authoritarianism not too different from Hugo Chavez’s victory in Venezuela in 1998. The junta can also find comfort in the fact that there are many more countries where the democratic process has been subverted to usher in semi-dictatorships such as Ukraine, Turkey, Nicaragua, Georgia, Hungary, and Peru.
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