Giving up on democracy for Thailand

By Chang Noi

Tue, December 12, 2006  

Over the past few days, Sondhi Limthongkul has made a mini-tour of the US, talking to audiences of Thais and interested observers.

His message was stark. The experience of Thaksin has shown that electoral democracy cannot work in Thailand. The mass of rural people who constitute the largest element in the electorate do not have the knowledge to participate properly. They sell their votes, either retail to the local canvasser, or wholesale to the populist who promises them goodies. This commercialism breeds a style of politician who is greedy and corrupt. The last few years have shown that a constitution, however well crafted, cannot impose any semblance of good governance.

What Sondhi says is important because he served as the lightning rod for the Bangkok middle class's emotional rejection of Thaksin. In many ways, he was a surprising candidate for this role. He had been one of Thaksin's most fervent supporters for five years. The two men are so similar that if you set out to clone Thaksin and made a tiny mistake you might finish up creating Sondhi. He became a key leader of the anti-Thaksin movement for two reasons: he had rare access to media outlets, and he changed his own tune to brilliantly articulate Bangkok middle-class opinion. We have to pay attention to him because he is undoubtedly still trying to channel this middle-class voice. 

What he is saying is not new, but as old as Thailand's first fragile experiments with democracy. Underlying his views is the city's fear of the countryside, the middle class's fear of the peasant.

In 1932, the pioneers of Thailand's middle-class politicians stopped short of ushering in a new democracy on the grounds the provinces were not yet ready. In the 1970s the middle class backed the military to thwart a pro-peasant insurgency. In the 1990s the middle class quietly cheered the Democrat governments for turning their backs on rural protesters, and occasionally beating them over the head. 

Underlying this fear is the huge divide in Thai society - not just the massive inequality in incomes, but the great imbalance in the distribution of social services and public goods, and also the cultural gap, which has widened as the city has grown richer, more confident and more dazzled by globalisation. Over a decade ago the political scientist Anek Laothammatas mused on the political consequences of having society divided into two virtual nations. The city people harboured dreams of a Western-style liberal democracy, but the villagers sent gangsters as MPs to the capital to wrest away whatever resources they could bring back to their constituencies while making some private benefit on the side. The constant clash of these two political cultures resulted in endemic political instability. Anek's answer was to educate the villagers in democracy, but also to put their needs on the national political agenda so that the gangsters would no longer have a role. 

To a very large extent, Thaksin was following that second part of Anek's agenda. The platform his advisers assembled before the 2001 election was simply a collection of measures that the rural electors said they wanted. The claim he made at the 2005 poll was that he alone could act as a channel for rural demands because other parties were not interested.

Thaksin's populism was sometimes crude, often extravagant, and always a cover for corruption, cronyism and profiteering. But what made this populism truly frightening for the middle class - and hence the focus of Sondhi's tirade - was its political implications. Thaksin was giving political legitimacy to rural demands. If this trend were followed to its logical conclusion, it would undermine the city's undue share of government spending and public goods. There would also be a bill, which the well-off might be asked to pay.

Sondhi is appealing to a deep vein of middle-class fear. Bangkokians no longer have to worry about rural revolution, and have even been spared the sight of rural protesters cluttering up the Bangkok pavements (an unappreciated benefit of the Thaksin era). But they understand that, deep down, electoral politics is a battle over the command of resources, and that Thaksin's populism showed the rural mass was starting to gain a larger share.

Seven years ago, on the eve of Thaksin's rise, Chang Noi wrote a piece on this same theme, joking that Bangkok would like to copy the Singapore Solution (giving away your rural hinterland, as Singapore did by splitting from Malaysia) or build a Great Wall round the city.  But Sondhi's solution is serious. He is turning his back on the last 75 years of Thailand's political history, saying that Thailand's social reality makes electoral democracy unworkable and constitutions futile.

Compared to Anek's proposals of a decade earlier, Sondhi's thinking represents a considerable hardening of attitudes. He claims he will continue to work for democracy, but only with the middle class because they alone understand that populist politicians abuse power. By implication, the rural masses do not qualify for this "democracy" so must be excluded or contained. 

This thinking may find its way into the drafting of the new constitution, in the form of measures designed to "upweight" the effective representation of Bangkok and "downweight" that of the countryside (for example, through a Senate partly appointed and partly elected as a single national constituency).

But this will fail. Thaksin became a populist not because he was born a populist but because he recognised there was a political demand which he could exploit to gain and retain power. Thaksin's populism does not show, as Sondhi claims, that the rural electorate is stupid, but rather that it is becoming more politicised and more astute in getting what it wants. Removing Thaksin from the political scene will not destroy the populism he came to represent. A constitutional solution that tries to ensure rural demands do not get the hearing they deserve in the formal politics of the nation will simply re-direct those demands elsewhere.

(http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2006/11/27/opinion/opinion_30020039.php)