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Thailand to hold first election since coup on March 24
BANGKOK, Jan 23, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Thailand will hold a general election on
March 24, authorities said Wednesday, the first national poll since a 2014
coup knocked out the civilian government of Yingluck Shinawatra.
The military has since rewritten the constitution, muzzled all dissent and
appointed junta allies across the bureaucracy in a bid to scratch the
Shinawatra clan from the Thai political scene and embed its own influence in
the country’s future.
“March 24 will be the election day,” an Election Commission official told
reporters, hours after the publication of a decree signed by King Maha
Vajiralongkorn empowered the EC to give a date.
Thailand’s history is pockmarked by coups, short-lived civilian governments
and political crises.
The poll date is set to ignite campaign season in a country where colourful
and boisterous political rallies have often tipped into deadly violence.
The office of Prayut, who is also prime minister, 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 to the military, others
to the still powerful Shinawatra clan — have already begun meetings and
recruitment as a blizzard of names are tossed up as likely future prime
ministers.
Those include Prayut, 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.
Yet 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 the kingdom’s
chasmic 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,” said Somjai Phagaphasvivat, a political
analyst at Thammasat University.
But he cast doubt on whether the caustic divisions of the past had been
healed.
MORE/SSS/1619 hrs
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“Under the coup… polarisation remained under the carpet; if you take the
carpet up, the polarisation remains,” he added.
– Shinawatras still in the game? –
Thailand last held a successful election in 2011.
That 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, both of whom are in self-exile.
The party is “ready” for the vote, spokeswoman Ladawan Wongsriwong said.
“Pheu Thai is a big party and we have been trusted across the country for a
long time.”
But the 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.
Thaksin, a policeman-turned-telecom billionaire, was toppled by a coup in
2006 and went into self-exile in 2008 over a graft conviction.
Yingluck fled Thailand in August 2017 before she could be sentenced for
criminal negligence linked to a rice subsidy scheme.
The siblings have crept back to prominence in step 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,” Chris Baker, a Thai
history expert said, despite the “extraordinary myth” of the billionaire
businessman as a kindred spirit of the common man.
Many Thais hold little enthusiam for elections, widely seen as stacked in
favour of the military.
“Under the junta the country is just going from bad to worse,” said news
vendor Lek, declining to give her full name. “Even if there is an election,
it will likely be the same prime minister.”
BSS/AFP/SSS/1620 hrs