Why they all love Thaksin

Thailand

Feb 10th 2005 PAI
From The Economist print edition

The biggest election win in Thai history

FROM an upstairs window, orange-robed monks stared at the crowd gathering at the makeshift polling station in the courtyard of their monastery. Hill-tribe women in colourful costumes and government officials in khaki uniforms stood out amid the mass of farmers and tradesmen waiting to cast their ballots in Thailand's parliamentary election. A Muslim man with a thin beard and a white skullcap rubbed shoulders with an ethnic Chinese woman in a red silk shirt. A limping pensioner rode up on the back of his grandson's motorcycle. For all their variety, however, this group of voters in Pai, in Thailand's rural north-west, had one thing in common: a desire to see Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand's outgoing prime minister, returned to office.

Mr Thaksin deserved another term, the Chinese woman confided, for his deft handling of the economy. Others mentioned his no-holds-barred war on drugs, and his lavish spending schemes, including cheap health care and micro-credit for villages. Even the one man who admitted voting for an opposition party said he did so only for the sake of checks and balances, and wanted Mr Thaksin to stay in charge.

He got his wish. For the first time ever in Thailand, a single party, Mr Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai, won the election outright. The official results are not known yet, but the projections show TRT sweeping 376 of the 500 seats in parliament. Its nearest rival, the Democrat Party, seems to have won just 96. Only two other parties, out of the 36 competing, won any at all.

The results confirmed several trends from the previous election, in 2001. In most of the country, Mr Thaksin's coat-tails counted for more than dynastic connections or a provincial power-base. Thus only two of the many local grandees on the ticket of the Mahachon party, which split from the Democrats before the election, won seats. But in the south of the country, the Democrats' grip seems as firm as Mr Thaksin's is elsewhere. It took 52 of the 54 seats there. All this has accelerated Thailand's drift towards a two-party system—albeit one which Thai Rak Thai roundly dominates.

Mr Thaksin has already declared that TRT will drop its former coalition partner, Chart Thai, and form a government on its own. (Chart Thai's leader, Banharn Silpa-archa, meekly said he would support Mr Thaksin anyway.) Meanwhile, Banyat Bantadtan, the wooden leader of the Democrats, has said he will resign. That should pave the way for the younger, punchier and more photogenic Abhisit Vejjajiva to lead the opposition.

Whoever is in charge, however, the opposition is unlikely to act as much of a brake on Mr Thaksin. They may not even be able to summon the 100 votes necessary to table (though not, of course, pass) a censure motion against a minister—the technique that won the Democrats attention in the old parliament. Thailand's media are cowed, the institutional oversight of government weak. Mr Thaksin's authority is virtually unfettered.

That need not mean big policy changes. Mr Thaksin has promised more populist schemes, of the type that have proved so pleasing to voters in places like Pai. The micro-credit schemes, for example, are to be upgraded to fully-fledged banks with an extra injection of government capital. Suranand Vejjajiva, a TRT spokesman, says Mr Thaksin also plans to complete some unfinished business from his first term, by pursuing education reform and further stimulating the economy. But he is unlikely to meddle much with the formula that has brought him such success.

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