It has all the ingredients of a daytime soap; dynasties, vindictive personalities, excessive greed, sudden plot twists, and karma. But Thailand’s political drama is no work of fiction and makes for troubling viewing, writes JOHN BLAXLAND in this special essay.

To visitors, Thailand is a land of warm hospitality, beautiful beaches, delicious cuisine and a stunning culture centred on the country's Buddhist traditions – often associated with meditation, serenity and centredness. 

So what is going on that has generated such jarring images of hatred, death, demagogic leadership and anti-democratic behaviour in the so-called land of smiles? There are competing and opaque narratives that are hard for the casual observer to peer through. This is one attempt to explain; and it starts with colour.

Reds versus Yellows
To some it is simple. It is a conflict between two sides. On one side is the rural poor, the red shirts, seen to be pro-democracy; and on the other is the royalist elites associated with the yellow shirts who morphed into the red-white-and-blue shirts and who are dismissed for their apparently anti-democratic behaviour. But the devil is in the detail. Rarely are issues best perceived in purely black and white (or red and yellow), and this is very much the case in Thailand, where what you see isn’t always what you get.

Thaksin: ‘champion of the poor’ or greediest PM ever?
According to the red shirt's narrative, ousted former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra is the ‘champion of the poor’. He was very popular with the northern and northeastern electorates for having introduced populist policies on public health, access to cheap loans, and government amenities. This won him the adoration of well over half the electorate.

Few genuinely dispute that Thaksin did a remarkable job in bettering the lives of the rural communities of the north and northeast of Thailand. But his war against crime involved commissioning the police force to engage in extra-judicial violence; it left some applauding his firmness and others horrified at the brutality and subversion of the system of justice. In Thailand’s deep south, his high-handed policies helped fan the flames of violent separatist insurgency which re-emerged in 2004 and which endures a decade later.

Thaksin’s sins were not just to be greedy, but exc---eedingly greedy -- and vindictive. His ostentatious greed came back to haunt him as people resented his exploitation of government contracts for billions of dollars in personal and family gain.

To be sure, previous prime ministers had left office considerably wealthier than beforehand. Some even left in exile, never to return. Thaksin, however, was different. He lacked subtlety, modesty, discretion or much compassion – and (how dare he?) he keeps wanting to come back!

Thaksin’s fall from grace
Thaksin was prime minister from 2000 to 2006 when he was ousted in a bloodless military coup. The September 2006 coup took place just over a week before the annual military reshuffle at which point he intended to replace Thailand’s military chiefs with more pliant successors. Such a move would have left him in control of the one remaining institution of state that he had not yet managed fully to control. This seemed an intolerable proposition.

The interim government, established with backing from Democrat Party members, set about writing a fresh constitution. This was aimed in part at disenfranchising Thaksin’s MPs for corruption and was written with the intention of having enough checks and balances to prevent Thaksin’s re-emergence. This constitution was endorsed at the time of the next elections held in December 2007 that were intended to replace the interim coup-appointed administration. Events would show that their efforts were largely in vain.

Thaksin’s return by proxy
The problem was that even with a rejigged constitution designed to reduce Thaksin’s political traction, his proxy party still won the elections.

Thaksin’s protégés – successively prime ministers Samak Sundaravej (2007-2009), Somchai Wongsuwan (2009) and now his sister Yingluck Shinawatra (2011-2014) have carried on his mandate through his successive proxy parties renamed each time a constitutional injunction threatened to delegitimise them. Currently Thaksin’s party is the Phuea Thai Party (‘Party For the Free’ or ‘Party For the Thai People’ – Thai meaning ‘free’ or ‘independent’).

The opposing groups see Thaksin as trumped up, vain, greedy and dangerous. Their disdain is accentuated by Thaksin’s apparent disregard for the monarchy and reported attempts to unduly influence key members of the royal family – a big ‘no-no’ in a land where lese majeste (the crime of violating royalty) laws are extremely harsh. As the end of the king’s long reign approaches, fears of how Thaksin might seek to manipulate the highest office are generating fearsome responses.

Yellow shirts, Abhisit and the Democrats take office
Opposition is seen to revolve around what were once called the ‘yellow shirts’ – once led by now discredited Sonthi Limthonkul along with retired major-general and former Bangkok governor, Chamlong Srimuang. They successfully closed down Bangkok’s main international airport in 2008. They did that before enlisting the support of a breakaway coalition party from Thaksin’s camp to cross-over and join the then opposition Democrat Party. That defection (Newin Chidchop’s Bhum Jai Thai Party) sufficiently altered the balance of power in parliament to bring about a change of government without having to call an election. Critics labelled this a coup, but in reality such constitutional shenanigans have happened in other parliamentary democracies without demur.

The so-called Democrat Party government that followed was led by British-born and Oxford-educated Abhisit Vejjajiva (PM from late 2009 to 2011). He came across very eloquently (in Thai and English) but failed miserably at gaining any political traction in Thailand’s rural north and northeast regions, even though he belatedly agreed to try and match Thaksin’s electoral promises that were so popular there. He and his deputy Suthep Thaugsuban ordered the controversial May 2010 military crackdown on the ‘redshirts’ who had occupied the heart of the ritzy downtown Bangkok shopping district of Ratchaprasong

Yingluck 2011 Thai election victory and political challenges
Abhisit lost the 2011 elections convincingly to Thaksin’s photogenic sister and current PM, Yingluck Shinawatra and the Phue Thai Party. Abhisit’s defeat occurred after investing precious little effort into seeking to woo the electorate in north and northeastern Thailand away from Thaksin’s populism.

More recently one of his most popular deals administered through his sister Yingluck, the rice pledge scheme, has started unravelling gravely. His promise to maintain a fixed price for farmers’ rice crops has generated unsustainable rice holdings as prices have plummeted, leaving the nation with billions of dollars in debt and a looming global rice market crisis if or when the nation’s internal rice prices are allowed to fall back to earth. Poor rice farmers affected by the virtual collapse of Thaksin’s rice buy-back scheme are wavering, with some already speaking out against Thaksin’s proxy government.

Yingluck Shinawatra managed to establish good rapport with the military chiefs following the 2012 floods of Bangkok and the central plain. But the reports of Thaksin’s direct and overt manipulation of Thai politics – even directly appointing senior police and other senior government officials without consulting Yingluck, led to rising levels of contempt and a greater willingness to stand up against the Shinawatra system and for more people than ever to be willing to operate outside the parliamentary system which is seen as co-opted by Thaksin.

The catalyst for dramatic action was the attempt to pass an amnesty act which would have absolved not only Abhisit and Suthep for the May 2010 crackdown, but also would have rehabilitated her brother Thaksin, allowing him to return to Thailand without having to face a two-year jail sentence for corruption. Nowadays, many claim they have joined the protest movement in an attempt to stop the Shinawatras and to restore a semblance of order which the predominantly Bangkok-based protesters are more comfortable with.

Suthep’s appeal in Bangkok
The Bangkok-based yellow shirts have morphed into the red-white-and-blue staunch monarchists. This group has, for the last couple of months, been led, in effect, by the firebrand former Democrat Deputy PM, Suthep Thaugsuban. The so-called ‘ammat’, or the Bangkok royalist elites, are seen to be closely associated with this group. The red shirts’ rhetoric of the ‘ammat’ carried some resonance when the yellow-shirt crowds protested in 2009 against Thaksin’s proxies in office. After all, at the time, protesters numbered only in the several thousands in a city of 12-or-so million people.

Despite their small numbers, they carried disproportionate weight in domestic political affairs. The yellow shirts were essentially untouchable by the police and carried considerable sympathy within higher echelons of the establishment, including the military – much to the chagrin of Thaksin and his red-shirt supporters. This time around, however, the anti-Thaksin protests have much broader appeal. While admittedly still predominantly Bangkok-based, they are extending further into the middle class, into southern Thailand and, reportedly, pockets of the northeast.

Notwithstanding this broader appeal evident, the Democrats have boycotted the elections just held – much as they did early in 2006 – a move that helped precipitate the September 2006 coup. They took this step knowing they had virtually no prospect of ever winning an outright parliamentary majority, let alone being able to muster a governing coalition.

Their actions outside the processes mandated by the constitution have considerable tacit support from the Electoral Commission. This is an organisation which critics portray as stacked by pro-Democrats supporters. Such support is also found in the National Anti-Corruption Commission, which is threatening to oust Yingluck and her MPs on charges of corruption – a move which also suggests a stretch of their mandate for party-political purposes in support of the Democrats. The potential actions of these bodies bring an added element of suspense to an already complicated scene.

Police-military dynamics
As a former police officer, Thaksin has many supporters and sympathisers within the police force. In simple terms, the police force is seen as sympathetic with Thaksin and with the red shirts, while the military has been seen by critics as staunch defenders of the institutions of the elite and associated with the Democrat Party. This is an inherently unhelpful perception to be propagated for the health of civil society in any country. Police and military chiefs recognise these dangers and seek to downplay the differences, but they remain and they are palpable.

The military chiefs understand the electoral muscle of the Shinawatra clan and know from their experience in 2006 that staging a coup is not likely to resolve the problem. Thailand is too politically polarised today for a military intervention to resolve any of the current crop of problems. There are also concerns about so-called ‘watermelon’ soldiers – green on the outside but red-sympathisers on the inside. These fears are particularly noticeable in Thailand’s north and northeast where many of the soldiers are recruited from and where many of them are based.

The Thai Chief of Defence Forces, General Tanasak Patimaprakorn, and Army Chief, General Prayuth Chan-o-Cha, are eight months short of retiring. They see little incentive to go down in history as another set of coup leaders that further sully Thailand’s reputation and democratic credentials. Critical commentators often point to the 18 coups since the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in 1932. But there has been only one such coup since 1992 and that was in 2006 – an event both men see as having been unsuccessful and not worthy of being repeated. These two men are military commanders who know their limitations and who are honourable; seeking, by and large, to do the best thing for their country. The problem is that the best thing is increasingly difficult for them to discern.

Democracy in a Buddhist nation state
Some observers point to an inherent incompatibility of the Western concept of democracy in a predominantly Buddhist, but religiously diverse state – where Hindu concepts and practices sit comfortably as part of the Thai Buddhist narrative. To be sure, there certainly is an element of kharmic order that many perceive to be at play there.

In broad terms, one who believes in reincarnation comes to believe that where one is born in a society’s ‘pecking order’ is where one belongs. While the poorer darker-skinned people of Thailand’s north and northeast – the ‘chao-naa’ or rice farmers – were welcome to participate in the electoral process, they were to do so on the implicit understanding that they did not get to ‘call the shots’ in forming a government.  For generations, a succession of governments formed from various factions of the Bangkok elite has ruled the country.

Thaksin’s populism and the rising living standards in the north and northeast have upset this apparent kharmic order – much to the consternation of those in Bangkok who see themselves at the top of the kharmic ‘totem pole’. Others less steeped in Buddhist practices or world-view (along with many postmodern Westerner observers) dismiss this perception as superficial and irrelevant. No doubt the economic dimension to the political equation is resoundingly significant, but observers should be wary about imposing their own cultural value system when seeking to understand and interpret the myriad of factors at work in the Thai body politic. In Thailand kharma still matters.

Thailand’s transitory or enduring social cleavage
Some wonder if the political impasse would be resolved if Thaksin and his clan simply disappeared from the scene. Others see this as fanciful, simplistic and naïve. To them the divide in Thai society is far deeper, palpable and likely to be enduring. That divide sees the predominantly rural north and north-east pitted against the urbanised people in and around Bangkok, supported by the Democrat’s base in southern Thailand.  Yet others see this as an over-simplification of a more nuanced picture, where Democrats carried significant minorities of the popular vote in northern or north-eastern electorates, but a sufficient proportion of the vote to negate this perception as unduly simplistic.

Many pine for the day, as in 1992, when the reigning monarch stepped in to resolve the political impasse of the time. Today, the much-loved king is ageing and unwell. As much as the people wish him long life, he appears unable to make a decisive contribution. Many fear that it is hard to conceive of any successor being able to fill his shoes. Such concerns appear to be making the political jockeying all the more desperate.

Dr John Blaxland is a Senior Fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, School of International Political and Strategic Studies, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. He is a former Australian Defence Attaché to Thailand and has recently returned from Bangkok. His latest book, The Australian Army from Whitlam to Howard (Cambridge University Press, 2014) discusses, among other things, the significance of the bilateral military relationship between Australia and Thailand.