Thaksin and his cronies handed the establishment an opportunity to strike back by abusing power and profiting personally from it. A billionaire telecommunications tycoon, Thaksin presided over the trebling of his family’s assets in the stock market. He also engineered an extrajudicial drug-suppression campaign that claimed 2,275 lives.
Thaksin’s sins are voluminous, and became the basis of the rise of his yellow-shirted opponents, the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), which entered the electoral arena as the New Politics Party. The PAD spent much of last year demonstrating against the two successive Thaksin-nominated governments that arose from the December 2007 election, reinvigorating Thai Rak Thai’s anti-PAD red-shirted allies, the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD).
After more than three years, Thailand’s crisis has become a knotty saga. Abhisit’s pledges of reform and reconciliation in the wake of April’s riots have made little headway. The PAD wants to maintain the 2007 charter. The UDD favors reinstatement of the 1997 Constitution. Enraged by a sense of social injustice, the reds rail against the establishment’s double standards, while the pro-establishment yellows have hunkered down for a battle of attrition.
In the process, what had been a pro- and anti-Thaksin fight has gradually become a pro- and anti-monarchy struggle. The rigidly hierarchical forces of the establishment are insecure and fearful of what will happen after the king dies. Lese majeste cases alleging insults against the immediate royal family are on the rise. Many thousands of Web sites challenging establishment interests and deploring post-coup machinations have been blocked.
Thaksin’s appeal splits the reds. Many repudiate his corruption but, in challenging the post-coup status quo, have no recourse except to use him as a rallying symbol.
Likewise, all yellows find Thaksin’s misrule intolerable, but not all are fanatical royalists. A stalemate has taken hold, with the denouement likely to be reached only after the royal succession.
A new consensus is imperative if Thailand is to regain its footing. That consensus would have to be based on mutual recognition and accommodation.
The reds will need to distance themselves from Thaksin’s abuses of power as much as the yellows will have to accept some of Thaksin’s policy legacy, particularly grassroots opportunities for jobs, education and upward mobility.
Thitinan Pongsudhirak is a professor and director of the Institute of Security and International Studies, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.
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