Thai King Maha Vajiralongkorn yesterday issued a decree endorsing the first general election since a 2014 coup, with the date for the long-delayed poll set for March 24.
The election is to be the first in the kingdom since the military toppled the administration of former Thai prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra, rewriting the constitution, muzzling all dissent and appointing key junta allies across the bureaucracy.
“It’s a suitable time to hold an election of members of parliament,” the decree said, published in the Royal Gazette and countersigned by Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha.
Photo: Reuters
The decree is set to ignite campaign season in a nation where colorful and boisterous political rallies have often tipped into violence.
Prayuth’s office called for an “environment of orderliness, civility and unity” — although violence is unlikely among a public tired of political conflict.
An array of new parties — including some aligned with the military, others to the Shinawatra clan — have already begun meetings and recruitment as a blizzard of names are tossed up as likely future prime ministers.
Those include Prayuth, who has spent months touring the country as he rebrands himself from a gruff man in khaki to an avuncular civilian leader with a common touch.
However, he is deeply unpopular among many Thais, who have wearied of his hectoring style as well as a junta accused of running down the economy and doing little to address graft, poor education standards and social inequality.
Even if the junta’s rivals do well in elections, any new civilian government is expected to be hamstrung by the military-scripted constitution.
It allows for a fully appointed upper house and embeds 20-year strategies governing everything from the economy to education.
“You can call it hybrid democracy,” Thammasat University political analyst Somjai Phagaphasvivat said.
Thailand last held a successful election in 2011, which catapulted the then-political neophyte Yingluck, the younger sister of billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra, into office as head of the Pheu Thai party.
Questions remain over Pheu Thai’s enduring electoral pull among its vote banks in the poor, rural north and northeast without the star power of the brother-sister duo, who are in self-exile.
Long years of junta rule have decimated the networks of the Thaksin-affiliated “Red Shirts,” while scores of key Pheu Thai politicos have been co-opted into the army-linked Phalang Pracharat party.
The Shinawatra clan sits at the core of Thailand’s political rupture.
Their supporters say they are the first political dynasty to address the aspirations of Thailand’s poor in a sharply hierarchical kingdom where wealth is hoarded by the Bangkok business elite.
To their enemies among the ultra-royalist, conservative elite, they toxified Thai politics and society with graft, nepotism and populist handouts.
The siblings have crept back to prominence with the approach of elections.
Thaksin has launched a weekly podcast, sharing his views on everything from Bangkok’s pollution crisis to the global economy.
“He still figures in Thailand as a popular hope,” despite the “extraordinary myth” of the billionaire businessman as a kindred spirit of the common man, Thai history expert Chris Baker said.
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