Over the past year, since Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra was elected in July 2011, the balance of power has shifted precariously, back and forth, between the Thaksin/Red Shirt/ Puea Thai forces and the establishment pro-royalist forces, allied with the army.
As Asia Times has written in several comprehensive pieces, the army, which cast serious dishonor upon itself with the killings in the streets of Bangkok in the spring of 2010, restored some of its positive image through effective relief work during the floods of 2010, at a time when the Yingluck government seemed to be flailing in handling the crisis. The army further strengthened its hand by, in recent months, removing some senior officers loyal to Thaksin and solidifying the top corps with staunchly royalist officers who are loyal to the army chief of staff. Yingluck’s government has in many ways acceded to the establishment, by doing nothing to stop the procession of lèse-majesté cases, and by publicly wooing senior Privy Council leaders as well as the military. (Most recently, the editor of Prachatai received a suspended sentence for the absurd crime of not deleting quickly enough anti-monarchical sentiments from the website.)
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