Sex, lies and cooking

10 July 2000

Sudarat Keyuraphan’s campaign for the Bangkok mayoralty has suffered a truly spectacular meltdown. Months ago, she was the frontrunner. Even after Samak Sundaravej announced his candidacy, it looked a close race. Now she’s miles behind in the polls, her campaign is in crisis, and the post mortems have already begun.

Why so? In one sense, this is nothing new. The Bangkok electorate always acts like an avalanche. A decade ago it went overboard for a flaky ex-soldier with strange sexual and dietary habits. In the mid-90s, it fell in love with the bright young things in the Democrat Party. At the first Senate round, it plumped for a retired bureaucrat who none of the pundits had spotted. It seems that Bangkok’s electors want to end up all voting the same way. Remember Bhichit at the last mayoralty elections. At first he didn’t look promising. Too academic. Too politically isolated. Too full of himself. But by polling day, he looked like a winner, so everyone voted for him and made him winner by a mile. First a rumble. Then an avalanche.

Perhaps too, Sudarat’s meltdown is not personal. It’s a matter of sex. Samak has sprinted away not only from Sudarat, but all the ladies. At one point both Sudarat and Paveena Hongsakul looked to be in the race with him. But now he outpolls the votes of Sudarat, Paveena and Kalaya Sophonpanich combined.

Chang Noi has a hunch that when the election was still far off and theoretical, it seemed a very good idea to elect a woman. New, exciting, different. But as the election became real and close, it seemed a very bad idea. Wrong, untried, dangerous. Political power in Thailand is so male-identified. Men run things. Women don’t. Once all those big sidewalk posters went up, reality bit.

These poster campaigns show the problem. The candidates can chat on radio, put ads on TV, wave from traffic islands, and shout from the soapbox, but these big sidewalk posters have become the real battleground of Bangkok campaigning. And here the three leading ladies have stumbled against the problem: how does a woman present herself as a credible candidate.

As Sudarat’s team has said, they put a lot of thought into the poster. The jacket and tailored collar make her stylish. The discreet string of pearls, matching earrings and designer specs shout affluence. The clean uncluttered design says modern, punctuated by the website address in the corner. She’s looking at us with a bright, intelligent smile.

But she’s absolutely static. This is surprising. Her leader, Thaksin, has pioneered the political action poster. In the first of these, he was pointing energetically towards a great future. In this past year’s campaign, it is not clear whether he is about to have a coughing fit or reveal to us the secret of life. But something is about to happen. Sudarat, by contrast, is totally frozen. She is not action woman ready to solve our problems. The combined effect of the smart rig and languid pose is that she look’s like the boss’s secretary.

Paveena has struggled too. The clothes are muddy colours. The jacket doesn’t seem to fit her at the neck. She’s still sporting the rooster hairdo fashionable about a decade ago. She’s obviously good-looking, but is either too poor or too unconcerned to get a good tailor and hairdresser. She has been photographed with a soft focus and her eyes slightly closed, with the result she looks half asleep. Who is this woman? Probably a teacher or social worker who works to the point of exhaustion.

Kalaya’s two-toned retro-styled image is the most striking entrant in this pavement warfare. The sheer degree of styling asserts modernity, excitement and difference. But such styling has its dangers. The graphic background looks like a thunderstorm—not a good bit of symbolism in Atlantis-Bangkok. More importantly, the high-contrast treatment takes out not only the wrinkles, but the experience. The result is either a lady lying about her age. Or a wide-eyed freshie.

Of course the men are doing little better. Prachak’s battle camouflage and heavy puns about revolution are taking him lower and lower in the polls. Vinai has borrowed an image of Alfred E. Neumann from the front cover of Mad magazine.

Samak’s poster is a study in conservatism. White shirt. Unnoticeable tie design. The tell-tale lapel pin. A firm, unsmiling stare. Against real competition, this might not have worked. But in the current context it says: this town is too tough for a woman to run. To win, Samak noted recently, he just has to avoid the banana skins.

How to forge an attractive public style for a woman in a culture where power is traditionally a male preserve? The answer has to be some blend of the femaleness the ladies cannot deny, and the attributes of power which men currently monopolise. All three of the leading ladies have tried to find a formula. But somehow they all have too much of the first part (femaleness) and not enough of the second (power attributes). Donning a tailored jacket is not enough. As a result, they too easily lapse into gender stereotypes—the boss’s secretary, the overworked teacher, the wide-eyed freshie.

Maybe the single thing which all three of their images lack is energy.

Here lies the bigger problem. Maybe the problem with Samak’s candidacy is not that he goes on babbling lies about his past as one of Thailand’s most consistently reactionary politicians, but that he is looking for a political prize not a tough job. Running Bangkok is dogged by the deadweight of corruption and the inertia induced by the city’s appalling problems. Bhichit was able to shift this deadweight a bit through sheer energy and the help of some dedicated friends. Samak is running solo. He doesn’t seem to have a programme. He wants the election victory, it seems, to crown his political career and erase the memory of his party’s pathetic disintegration. Once elected, he will be sorely tempted to treat it like a retirement posting. The percentage men will rule.

Besides, Samak’s victory could be a loss for Bangkok in another way. He is a brilliant radio presenter, especially on topics connected with food and cooking. Chang Noi confesses that his programmes can stir the saliva and bring on an impulse to rush to the fresh market. Until he got this idea of the mayoralty, he was looking forward to extending this career into television. He would be great. His eloquence would be put to much better use. He claims he will keep up the radio programmes while mayor (umm, what does this say about priorities), but the television is off.

Samak’s election will be a double loss. Because the Bangkok electorate cannot handle sex and doesn’t care about lies, it will forfeit both a good mayor and a good cooking presenter.