Can Yingluck End Thailand’s Chaos?

5 Jul 11
Written by A. Lin Neumann
Asia Sentinel, Hong Kong

Had the elites been paying attention, a lot of this mess could have been avoided

If the reactions to Sunday’s stunning electoral win by Yingluck Shinawatra in Thailand’s general elections hold, perhaps the nation has finally found a way out of the mess created by the 2006 military coup that ousted her older brother, Thaksin Shinawatra. All sides, it seems so far, are willing to accept the Puea Thai party’s majority win. “I can assure that the military has no desire to stray out of its assigned roles,” General Prawit Wongsuwan, a former army chief close to the leaders involved in the 2006 coup, told Reuters. “The army accepts the election results.”

This is a very good thing.

Regardless of what one thinks of Thaksin, the one-time populist strongman pulling the Puea Thai strings from his exile perch in Dubai, even the Thai army and the royalist insiders who orchestrated the coup must see the futility of trying to battle the popular tide by now. A tycoon with a dismal human rights record and little regard for the niceties of independent media, courts or regulatory bodies, Thaksin redrew the map of Thai politics with his direct populist appeal to a rural population that had long been taken for granted by the establishment in Bangkok.

Having learned his craft building a virtual mobile phone monopoly that saw nearly every Thai chipping a few baht a day into his corporate coffers, Thaksin knew something about marketing. With his background as a police officer and a strong regional business family from the northern city of Chiang Mai, he also knew something about raw power, which he wielded with a heavy hand in shooting drug dealers and sending the army into the restive southern Muslim provinces to enforce a get-tough policy that backfired.

However, his strong-arming, coupled with pro-poor policies, was — and is — popular. Just how popular the past five years have shown as the state and the Bangkok royalist elite have failed miserably to put together a government that could win a victory at the polls, instead using the courts and the army to get their way. Now, finally, it appears that everybody has decided to calm down and accept the Thaksin reality after five years of pointless chaos.

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