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2 ASIA
HAND Politics by proxy in
Thailand By Shawn W Crispin
BANGKOK - When Thaksin Shinawatra launched
his populist Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party, it ran and
was swept into electoral office on a "think new,
act new" campaign slogan. Six years and one
military coup later, the party's new incarnation
as the People's Power Party (PPP), in contrast,
represents a distinct step back in time.
On May 30, TRT was legally dissolved and
its executive members
banned for five years from
politics by the military-created Constitution
Tribune on electoral-fraud charges held over from
inconclusive 2005 polls. Next week, TRT's
political remnants will formally reconvene under
the PPP banner, in time to contest new general
elections tentatively scheduled for December.
The PPP is expected to select right-wing
politician and party outsider Samak Sundaravej as
its nominal leader, marking a break from TRT's
post-coup leadership under the soft-spoken,
left-leaning former student activist Chaturon
Chaisaeng. TRT fragmented badly under Chaturon's
eight-month stewardship, where at least three key
factional leaders and as many as 175 former
parliamentarians ditched the party either to join
political forces with the military or to strike
out on their own.
Samak, 72, on the other
hand, is a vintage old-style Thai politician, a
tough-talking ultra-conservative with longtime
links to the armed forces. Renowned for his fiery
oratory in Parliament and popular among Bangkok's
lower classes for his charisma and televised
Thai-cooking program, Samak's appointment will
signal a distinct move to the political right for
the mass party. TRT-cum-PPP stalwarts are wagering
that his veteran leadership will be able to hold
the party's center and preserve its grassroots
populist appeal while Thaksin is in exile.
Last Friday, Samak in a press interview
said he decided to come out of retirement and
re-enter politics in the wake of TRT's
court-ordered dissolution, and that after speaking
by telephone with Thaksin he agreed to "look
after" the former premier's party members while
they contest the next polls under a new PPP
banner. From exile, Thaksin in a video recently
advised PPP candidates to campaign on TRT's past
achievements.
About 200 former TRT members
of Parliament recently gathered at a party meeting
- though many of them are disqualified from
running for office and may only play advisory
roles to the PPP. Leveraging the former TRT's
established electoral machinery and franchise in
the pivotal north and northeast regions, which
will account for 212 of the Lower House's total
480 seats, political analysts believe the PPP
could win as many as 150 seats. PPP is likely to
be a strong force, but not the political
juggernaut that won 377 of 500 at the 2005 polls
and will likely not notch enough seats to be able
independently to form the next government.
Political street fighting But
there is more at play than mere political-party
reconfiguration. Samak's selection as party leader
to many political analysts signals a new era of
contentious and unstable coalition politics,
prolonging the period of political conflict
between Thaksin and the coup makers fought out by
their proxies in a partially elected, partially
appointed new Parliament.
The military is
expected to run candidates under a newly formed
Rak Chart (Love the Nation) party, possibly
including coup leader General Sonthi
Boonyaratklin, and will be highly influential in
the appointment of nearly half of the 150-member
Senate. The political risk is that Thai politics
has re-entered its vicious historical cycle of
coup, new constitution, new political parties,
election, honeymoon period, political crisis and
new coup. [1]
Samak has a long political
history of locking horns with former army
commander and appointed prime minister, now Privy
Council president, Prem Tinsulanonda, whom
pro-Thaksin protesters have accused publicly of
orchestrating last year's coup independent of his
role as palace adviser. [2]
Separate from
the PPP, pro-Thaksin street demonstrators have
recently upped the tempo of their protests by
directly targeting Prem, including calls for his
resignation and a raucous protest in front of his
private residence in Bangkok that saw the eventual
arrest of nine protest leaders. [3]
As the
highly revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej's chief
adviser, Prem has since joining the monarch's
Privy Council hovered above the fray of political
and media criticism. But in the run-up to and
aftermath of last year's coup - where
anti-government protest leaders and later the
military raised questions about Thaksin's loyalty
to the crown - different questions have emerged
about how a little-known, minority Muslim army
commander (Sonthi) could have staged the coup
without a wink and a nod from above - meaning
Prem.
Thaksin's supporters outside the PPP
have taken a calculated but risky gamble in trying
to strip Prem of his royal aura and drive a
political wedge between him and the palace.
Political history shows that then-prime minister
Prem came under similar
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