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Thaksin's still tops in
Thailand
By Marwaan
Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - 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 Southeast Asia: the
triumph of one-party states.
Hints of
Thaksin's invincibility have gathered momentum
since January 10, when the country's Election
Commission began a five-day registration process
for contending political parties to nominate their
candidates for the February 6 poll.
The
Nation newspaper revealed that a forecast for the
general election placed Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai
(Thais Love Thai, or 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 more than 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, while the
Mahachon Party would only win 24. More than 20
political parties, including marginal ones, such
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," said Thitinan Pongsudhirak,
a political scientist at Bangkok's
Chulalonkorn University. "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 on
December 26. More than 5,300 people died, close to
half of them foreigners, when the giant wave hit
popular tourist resorts in the country.
"His commanding style in dealing with the
crisis and getting the bureaucracy into action was
seen by many and appreciated," said Thitinan.
"The tsunami gave him a chance of showing the best
of his top-down, centralized idea of government."
But even before the tsunami, which has
claimed more than 200,000 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 "Thailand's Man of the
Year" by 2,900 people chosen from across this
Southeast 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 programs 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 health-care scheme at
minimal cost to the sick and a campaign to
eradicate narcotics.
Aiding Thaksin
was the unprecedented majority he enjoyed
in parliament after the TRT's thumping victory
at the last elections, in January 2001. The 255
seats that the TRT secured were 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 between them have left more than 600
people dead.
The TRT's dominance in
parliament also enabled it to deflect a growing
list of human-rights violations leveled at the
government. "The steady erosion of respect for
human rights in Thailand that has characterized
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's rule
accelerated sharply in 2004," declared the global
rights lobby Human Rights Watch (HRW) in its
annual report released recently.
HRW drew
attention to abuses such as the impunity given to
the country's security forces to quell the
violence in the south, the more than 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," said Gotham Arya, head of Forum
Asia, a Bangkok-based regional human-rights
lobby. "The elections may strengthen it further."
For Thailand, this political chapter goes
against the grain of what had 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
most of Southeast 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
Organization (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 a
recent issue of The Nation, had other names in
mind: former Ugandan military ruler Idi Amin and
the former dictator of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic
of Congo, Mobuto Sese Seko.
(Inter Press
Service) |
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