THAI PRIME minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has apparently lost the support of the military chief and coalition allies who now back an immediate election. Thousands of redshirted protesters remain camped out in Bangkok’s streets, threatening further marches. And his party is threatened with disbandment following impropriety findings by the watchdog electoral commission over €6.5 million in illegal payments. He has little choice but to bow to the inevitable and go to the country. He should do so speedily.
The political authority of the Eton and Oxfordeducated scion of wealthy Thai society has been evaporating by the day as the country’s special brand of colour-coded class war plays out on the capital’s streets once again. Since 1946, when an 18-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej assumed the throne, Bangkok has seen nine coups and more than 20 prime ministers. Mr Abhisit’s days are almost certainly numbered.
The demonstrators who have been campaigning for a month for his resignation insist his administration, which came to power on the back of yellow-shirted street protests in a controversial parliamentary vote 16 months ago, lacks legitimacy and serves the narrow interests of the country’s upper class. And while a tentative truce is prevailing in the capital in the wake of Saturday’s bloody clashes which left 21 dead and over 800 injured, the brutal show of force has done nothing but expose the feet of clay of a beleaguered government.
The conflict reflects deep polarisation and class tensions in Thai society, in which the poorest fifth of the population earns only some 4 per cent of national income – most of the red-shirted demonstrators are poor peasants from the country’s north or workers from the cities, mainly supporters of the former, exiled prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Although a billionaire, and implicated in serious corruption, Mr Thaksin secured an unlikely political base among the poor as prime minister by giving them cheap healthcare and loans, and he and his allies have won the past four elections. Overthrown by a royalist military coup in 2006, the former PM has orchestrated protests from overseas since fleeing a Thai jail sentence in 2008.
The demonstrators say Mr Abhisit, who has never won a national election, embodies a privileged class of military officers, judges, bureaucrats and royal advisers, and only came to power in 2008 through parliamentary manoeuvres after the then government, allied to the exiled Mr Thaksin, was ousted by street protests.
Fresh elections are badly needed to restore Thailand’s fragile democracy. But that also requires the prime minister’s middle-class allies in the yellow-shirt movement to commit themselves to accept the decision of the country’s poor majority, something they have doggedly refused to do. Crucial to that prospect is the attitude of the widely revered 81-year-old King Bhumibol, who is in poor health and traditionally reluctant to engage in politics. He has yet to pronounce on the crisis but, paradoxical as it may seem, a royal imprimatur on the democratic process is badly needed.