By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Apr 3 2006 (IPS)

A young Thai woman and a retired medical doctor were among a legion of Bangkok’s voters who closed ranks to amplify the defining feature of Sunday’s snap parliamentary polls – the power of the ‘no vote’.

By Monday afternoon, the ruling Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thai – TRT) party, led by caretaker Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, was facing a clear rejection of its administration by this anti-government protest vote in the capital.

According to Thailand’s election commission, some 50.1 percent of the votes cast in Bangkok during the snap parliamentary poll were marked ‘no vote’, while candidates from the ruling party secured 45.9 percent of the ballots.

”I don’t like this government, nor Mr. Thaksin,” said Varittarat Tawanvivattanagul, a 19-year-old musician, who voted shortly after polls opened on Sunday morning. ”I voted for the ‘no vote’ because that is the way I can express my power. I was not going to sit at home and do nothing,” she said.

Dr. Chokhang Chutinatorn was equally passionate about why he cast a protest ballot for the first time in his voting life. ”He (Thaksin) is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He is not a defender of democracy,” the recently retired medical practitioner told IPS.. ”I voted ‘no’ as a way to get Thaksin to resign.”

The option for Thai voters to cast a ‘no vote’ ballot, introduced to this country’s election culture in the early 1990s, gained significance in the wake of political developments that converged to make the weekend election the most controversial since Thailand became a constitutional monarchy in 1932.

On the one hand, the three major opposition parties decided to boycott the poll after Thaksin called for a snap parliamentary election, late February. On the other, the protest vote was what anti-government critics called for after a two-month long campaign on the streets on Bangkok, which at times drew over 100,000 demonstrators, as part of their push for Thaksin to resign. They accused him of corruption, nepotism and the abuse of power.

Equally relevant was the challenge that Thaksin threw to this South-east Asian nation’s 45.2 million eligible voters during the past weeks that the poll should be seen as a referendum on his leadership.

The high percentage of negative votes cast in Bangkok stands in stark contrast to the number of ‘no votes’ cast across the entire country during the general elections in February last year, some 357,515, or 1.1 percent of the votes polled.

The 2005 elections were a triumph for Thaksin and the TRT. They were returned to power for a second consecutive term on the back of 19 million votes that earned them 376 seats in the country’s 500-member parliament. An estimated 70 percent of the 44.6 million eligible voters went out to vote.

This year’s results in Bangkok, which has 4.07 million eligible voters, will be hard for the government to ignore, say analysts, despite the certainty of the TRT winning all 36 of the capital’s parliamentary seats on account of a non-existent opposition.

”Bangkok has rejected Thaksin and he must heed this vote. This is a critical outcome,” Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, told IPS. ”The ‘no vote’ has emerged as a new phenomenon and it technically means that Thai Rak Thai has nothing to feel impressed.”

The choice of the voters to cast such a protest ballot also reflects a ”strong determination” by a silent majority to make their views heard, rather than ”staying at home because the outcome was inevitable,” he added. ”We have not had a situation like this before.”

The TRT faces worse trouble in the southern provinces, home to a significant Malay-Muslim population. Voters from that large minority community in predominantly Buddhist Thailand used Sunday’s ballot to both cast a ‘no vote’ and also deny TRT candidates running as sole contestants the minimum 20 percent of valid votes needed for a legitimate victory. An estimated 29 of the 41 who ran, failed to secure the minimum votes, necessitating by-elections.

”The people have suffered over the past two years and the vote here is to show they are not happy with Mr. Thaksin’s way of trying to solve the problems,” Fakhruddin Boto, a member of the Thai Senate from Narathiwat, the southern-most province, said during a telephone interview. ”This was expected.”

Over 1,100 people have died and there have been allegations of human rights abuses in the three Malay-Muslim provinces following an outbreak of violence between suspected insurgents and government troops. Tough responses, including a harsh emergency decree imposed last year and the increasing of troop strength have not improved this situation. Three bombs, in fact, exploded in Narathiwat on election day.

But the triumph of the ‘no vote,’ which only carries moral weight, will do little to change the picture expected to emerge by mid-week out of this one-sided election. In some 70 percent of constituencies TRT candidates ran unopposed. Still, there was a huge turnout for Thaksin in the country’s northern and eastern areas, home to the most voters in Thailand, the rural poor, who gained from a raft of pro-poor policies implemented by the government.

No wonder Suranand Vejjajiva, a TRT spokesman, chose to claim the poll as a victory for the government when he met reporters at the TRT’s headquarters in Bangkok on Sunday night. ”This is a historic day. We have preserved democracy in Thailand by voting,” he said.

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