THAI VOTERS have been unambiguous. The era of coups, they have said unequivocally, and of attempts by the military, old money, and their allies among royal advisers to thwart the popular will must end. The scale of the weekend’s comfortable election victory by the Puea Thai party led by Yingluck Shinawatra, sister of fugitive former PM Thaksin Shinawatra – with an estimated 265 out of 500 seats – has already forced welcome public declarations of acceptance of the result from both opposition and military.
“I can assure that the military has no desire to stray out of its assigned role,” Gen Prawit Wongsuwan, a former army chief, said yesterday, and political observers believe another coup is now most unlikely. Shares and the baht rose on the promise of a new stability.
Since King Bhumibol Adulyadej ascended to the throne in 1946 there have been nine coups, and 12 of the country’s 27 prime ministers since absolute monarchy ended in 1932 have been military leaders. Courts have disbanded two parties linked to Thaksin and disqualified two prime ministers allied to him since his overthrow in 2006 by a military coup. Since then the country has seen turmoil in the streets as conservative “Yellow Shirt” and his “Red Shirt” supporters vied for power. The latter blockaded parts of Bangkok in the past two years to push for an election. Protests last year resulted in 91 deaths.
The result’s decisiveness notwithstanding, the country remains deeply polarised between Bangkok’s urban middle classes and the urban and rural poor of the country’s north and north-east where preliminary results show Pheu Thai won nearly 80 per cent of seats. The Democrats Party took 85 per cent of seats in Bangkok and the south and is expected to get some 166 seats.
Yingluck (44), a political ingenue with a strong business background in the family Shinawatra group and a US master’s in public administration, will be Thailand’s first woman prime minister. She hopes to form a coalition with minor parties that should secure a 300-vote bloc and has promised to meet the army early. Her election should signal a somewhat looser fiscal policy that may help boost the economy, notably from plans to almost double the minimum wage to $10 a day in rural areas and to distribute tablet computers to students.
As for her popular billionaire brother – he fled a 2008 jail sentence for corruption and lives in Bahrain from where he allegedly masterminded his sister’s campaign – the opposition claims his return home, however provocative, may be sooner rather than later.