POLITICS-THAILAND: When Democracy Gives Way to One-Party Rule

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jan 17 2005 (IPS) - As a parliamentary election looms, Thailand’s incumbent prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, appears set to place his country firmly within the ambit of a political tradition that marks out South-east Asia – namely the triumph of one-party states.

Hints of Thaksin’s invincibility have gathered momentum since Jan. 10, when the country’s election commission began a five-day registration process for contending political parties to nominate their candidates for the Feb. 6 poll.

On Monday, ‘The Nation’ newspaper revealed that a forecast for the general election placed Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thai – TRT ) party as the clear winner in the battle for 400 of the parliament’s 500 seats to be decided through the ballot pitting individual party nominees against each other.

The TRT would win over 250 seats, the independent English daily reported, while the opposition Democrat party would win 81 seats. ‘The Nation’ predicted that the smaller Chart Thai party would secure 43 seats and the Mahachon party only 24. Over 20 political parties, including marginal ones with names as The Farmer Force party and the Thai Alternative party, are in the running.

The final composition of the new parliament will also include candidates chosen from the party-list tussle at the polls. Under this system, each political party is entitled to a share of 100 seats in the legislature based on the votes cast across the nation for a respective political party, as opposed to an individual candidate.

”The momentum is very much with Thaksin,” Thitinan Pongsudhirak, political scientist at Bangkok’s Chulalonkorn University, told IPS. ”He is being seen as a strong and decisive leader.”

Thitinan attributes some of this to Thaksin’s performance soon after the tsunami devastated the southern coast of Thailand as it did with the coastlines of 11 other Asian and African nations. Over 5,300 people died, close to half of them foreigners, when the wall of sea-water hit popular tourist resorts in Thailand on Dec. 26.

”His commanding style in dealing with the crisis and getting the bureaucracy into action was seen by many and appreciated,” added Thitinan. ”The tsunami gave him a chance of showing the best of his top-down, centralised idea of government.”

But even before the tsunami, which has claimed over 160,000 lives in the Indian Ocean rim countries, Thaksin’s unassailable position in the country’s political landscape was evident. An end-of-the-year poll by the Bangkok-based Assumption University declared that the premier had been voted as ‘Thailand’s Man of the Year’ by 2,900 people chosen from across this South-east Asian nation.

Such public approval has been a hallmark of his first four-year term in office.. It has been shaped by the sweeping populist programmes his administration pursued to help the rural poor and even the urban middle class. They include assistance to ease the debt weighing down farmers in the villages, providing a universal healthcare scheme at minimal cost to the sick and a campaign to eradicate narcotics.

Aiding Thaksin was the unprecedented majority he enjoyed in parliament, following the TRT’s thumping victory at the last elections, in January 2001. The 255 seats that the TRT secured was further strengthened by new alliances Thaksin formed with smaller political parties in the legislature. He had 364 seats backing his administration when his first term ended.

Such strength served to insulate the Thaksin administration from the barrage of criticism it has faced when the country was hit last year with the deadly bird flu virus and the outburst of violence in the three southern provinces that have left over 600 people dead.

The TRT’s dominance in parliament also enabled it to deflect a growing list of human rights violations levelled at the government.

”The steady erosion of respect for human rights in Thailand that has characterised Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s rule accelerated sharply in 2004,” declared the global rights lobby Human Rights Watch (HRW) in its annual report released last week.

HRW drew attention to abuses such as the impunity given to the country’s security forces to quell the violence in the south, the over 2,200 people killed during the government’s crackdown on drugs and the dwindling space for media freedom in the country.

”The past four years have removed little doubt about the one-party state emerging in Thailand,” Gotham Arya, head of Forum Asia, a Bangkok-based regional human rights lobby, told IPS. ”The elections may strengthen it further.”

For Thailand, this political chapter goes against the grain of what has been the pattern before Thaksin’s newly formed TRT appeared on the scene for the 2001 polls. Previous governments had been made up of fragile coalitions that never succeeded in completing their full four-year term.

Regionally, though, the fortunes of Thaksin’s party fit comfortably with the illustrious political tradition that spans across most of South-east Asia – the dominance of the one- party state.

Singapore has its long ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), while the Cambodian People’s Party still calls the shots in Cambodia. Malaysia’s dominant United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) has been the ruling party since independence in 1957. And Vietnam and Laos are under the spell of their respective communist parties.

That the TRT views itself as a worthy inheritor of this tradition has been echoed by leading members of its party, including Sudarat Keyuraphan, the deputy leader. Shortly after campaigning began, she said that Thailand needed its own UMNO to develop.

Even Thaksin’s critics are at a loss to deny such an eventuality. And what they have been reduced to are voices trying to search for parallels to portray him. Some academics see in the premier the makings of Ferdinand Marcos, the former Filipino strongman.

Sopon Onkgara, a columnist writing in Sunday’s issue of ‘The Nation,’ had other names in mind: former Ugandan military ruler Idi Amin and the former dictator of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mobuto Sese Seko.