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| Image: Flickr User - Prachatai |
By Shawn W. Crispin
The ruling junta is likely to remain in power for the foreseeable future.
Thailand is currently under the strictest military regime the country has seen since the early 1970s, an era when China-backed communist guerrillas threatened to overthrow the established monarchy-military symbiotic order. Despite rising controversy surrounding the current National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) junta’s heavy-handed rule, it’s a military regime that will likely remain in power for the foreseeable future.
To understand the present and project into the future, it’s important to understand Thailand’s recent past. The 2014 military coup marked the crescendo of anti-government street convulsions, staged initially against an amnesty bill that would have paved the way for the criminally convicted self-exiled former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra to return to Thailand a free man under his younger sister Yingluck Shinawatra’s elected government.
Those protests later morphed into broad, if not vague, calls for cleaner governance, an end to corruption and an overhaul of democratic politics. The street protest-enabled coup, rather than an answer to a popular reform call, was clearly orchestrated by royalist elites to ensure that top generals, rather than squabbling politicians, are in control at the time of what many view will be a delicate royal succession.
Since seizing power, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha’s junta has advanced reform rhetoric while simultaneously consolidating a strong and increasingly efficient police state bent on ferreting out and squashing dissent. Crackdowns on journalists and activists have become progressively more severe, including the recent commando-style abduction and physical beating in an open field of an anti-junta student activist. It has also ramped up punitive anti-royal charges against both critics of the crown and anti-military opponents.
The vow to restore democratic governance and hold new elections is and remains a sop to Western governments, namely the European Union and the United States, as well as certain local middle class constituencies who support the country’s long and painful struggle for democracy over military-led authoritarianism. The junta’s time table for new polls has been progressively pushed back, first promised for late 2015, then mid-2016 and now mid to late 2017.
That’s based on the assumption a new draft constitution passes a July referendum, which seems unlikely given reports that it, like a previous scrapped version, includes various controversial provisions that aim to uphold the military’s overarching political role. It’s not altogether clear what will happen if the charter is voted down, though it would almost certainly further attenuate the junta’s hold on power beyond 2017.
Rather than a near term democratic transition, Thai politics will more likely be steered by the military for the foreseeable future. Thailand has arguably already entered an end-of-reign new political order, where the military, rather than a democratic government, has begun to fill the inevitable power vacuum that will open at the end of the current king’s long and storied reign and the crowning of a new, inevitably less influential, heir.
Who wears that crown, however, is not a complete given. How a contest between competing royalist camps plays out in the weeks and months ahead could have significant implications for stability. Even with a calm and predictable succession, it is expected that the military government will invoke martial law to enforce an extended period of national mourning until the transition is deemed as safe and secure.
If there is any hint of turmoil around that process, either from a competing royalist or oppositional camp, the military leaders now in charge will likely jettison their self-professed commitment to restoring democracy and hunker down for an even longer stay. Only when the succession is considered settled and the monarchy upheld will the country begin to move back towards some type of, most likely highly circumscribed, democratic order.
Read the full story at The Diplomat