Economic Realignment Fuels Regional Political Divisions in Thailand
A
protester posed for a photo with two riot police officers in Bangkok,
where security forces took a softer approach on Tuesday.
Published: December 3, 2013
BANGKOK — Anand Panyarachun, one of Thailand’s leading statesmen,
recently noted that his country seemed to have everything going for it —
plentiful natural resources, good weather and fortunate geography free
from typhoons or volcanic eruptions.
Yet Thailand, he said, was “pulling the plug” on itself with destructive politics.
“I cannot explain what continues to overshadow all of this goodness,” he said.
The repeated bouts of violent unrest over the past seven years, including the grinding protests
that began here last week, are often attributed to the highly
personalized battle between opponents and allies of Thaksin Shinawatra,
the tycoon and former prime minister who was removed in a 2006 coup but
who remains a force in Thai politics.
Yet researchers and historians say something deeper is ailing the
country, a steady unraveling of an old consensus about who wields
political power and who receives government largess, questions that will
linger long after the last protester in the latest demonstrations goes
home.
“What has been happening in Thailand is not about Thaksin or not even
about conflicts among the elite — it’s socioeconomic change, enormous
change that has taken place for the past two decades,” said Nidhi
Eoseewong, a prominent historian.
Mr. Nidhi said the country had changed in tandem with Asia’s rapid
economic growth. Millions of peasant farmers have risen into the middle
class and are clamoring for more representation. “The old elite,
including the established middle class, doesn’t want to tolerate their
participation,” he said.
The protests of the past week have illustrated how the old establishment feels threatened by the power of the provincial masses.
The leader of the protests, Suthep Thaugsuban, a former executive in the
Democrat Party, Thailand’s oldest political party, has demanded that
the country abandon its electoral system in favor of an unelected and
ill-defined People’s Council.
The source of mistrust of electoral politics seems clear. The Democrat
Party has lost every election since 1992, mainly because it has failed
to gain support among the emerging rural middle class in the north.
The electoral power shift from Bangkok to the northern provinces is all
the more destabilizing because it comes amid uncertainty about the
future of Thailand’s monarchy. In his more than six decades on the
throne, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who turns 86 on Thursday, has helped
define the country’s identity and provided cohesion for its linguistic
and ethnic groups. But some analysts say the adoration of the king has
been a crutch for the nation and that his death could further test the
fragile relationships between the powerful military, the elites and the
emerging middle class.
Power struggles between Bangkok and the provinces, especially the
populous northeast, go back at least a century, according to Charles
Keyes, an American scholar and the author of a new book on the integration of the northeast into the Thai state.
An insurrection by northeasterners was brutally repressed by government
troops in 1902. Half a century later, an authoritarian government
ordered the killings of a number of prominent northeastern politicians.
“There’s been a pattern of trying to negotiate a right to be recognized,
to have a political voice and to determine their own future,” Mr. Keyes
said of northeastern Thailand, whose inhabitants speak Lao, which is
distinct but related to Thai. “We see a lot of echoes of that today.”
Electoral politics, and especially the rise of Mr. Thaksin’s party and
its focus on rural areas, has allowed the northern part of Thailand to
assert itself. Northeastern Thailand, once considered a backwater, is
still poorer than Bangkok but outpaces the capital in economic growth.
From relying almost exclusively on subsistence farming, the northeast
now has industries, shopping malls and universities.
Home to a third of the country’s voters, the region now effectively
makes or breaks governments. The government’s policies cater to the
northeast, including a highly contentious program that pays farmers a
price well above market rates for their rice — at great cost to the
state.
For voters in Bangkok, that is hard to bear.
“I understand that democracy means being governed by a majority,” said
Chaiwat Chairoongrueng, a 36-year-old civil servant protesting last
week. “But you cannot use the majority to rule over everything.”
Protesters did little to hide their sense of superiority, echoing the
leaders of the demonstration who repeatedly described the demonstrators
as “good people” fighting evil.
“We are the middle class, we are educated and we know best,” said
Saowanee Usanakornkul, 43, from southern Thailand who took part in the
protest. “We know what is right and wrong,” she said. “But the poor
don’t know anything. They elect the people who give them money.”
One of the most contentious issues in recent months, and one of the
sparks for the protests, was a battle over whether the country’s Senate
should be fully elected.
The military, which has historically represented the interests of the
Bangkok elite and the royal court, named a committee after deposing Mr.
Thaksin in 2006 that allowed for roughly half the Senate seats to be
appointed by judges and senior civil servants.
Mr. Thaksin’s party, which swept back to power in 2011 — a reflection of
the electoral might of the emerging middle class in the countryside —
passed a constitutional amendment this year to restore direct elections.
But before the amendment was signed into law, the country’s
constitutional court struck it down, saying it violated the rights of
the minority in the country.
This and other rulings against the governing party have engendered
mistrust in the country’s institutions among people in the provinces and
fueled the constant cycle of volatile street politics.
In recent days, as the protests flared, Bangkok was rife with rumors
about shadowy groups commandeering the demonstrations; the Thai news
media carries perennial stories about the prospect for another coup.
In discussing Thai politics soon after the last violent clashes
in Bangkok — a military crackdown that left more than 90 people dead in
2010 — Benedict Anderson, an expert on Southeast Asia at Cornell,
quoted the political thinker Antonio Gramsci to illustrate his fears: “When the old refuses to die, and the new is struggling to be born, monsters appear.”
Mr. Nidhi, the historian, said it might be years before Thailand reached
a new ruling consensus and the country was more settled.
“In all societies, politics needs time to adjust to large social
transformations,” he said. “You have to give Thailand more time.”
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