Where is the soul of Thai Rak Thai?

26 November 2001

Does Thai Rak Thai’s soul belong with the old politics or the new?

Thaksin’s election victory in January 2001 was new. For the first time, a leader asked the mass of the people to vote for him because he promised to do something for them. Thaksin talked to local leaders and NGO workers. He recruited old activists with a commitment to social change. He sat down with the Assembly of the Poor and negotiated a peace treaty, after which they raised their two-year siege of Government House. He put bright, committed reformers in several key ministries. Thaksin understood that something major had changed over the previous decade. People are no longer afraid to demand change. Other politicians were reluctant to accept this. That gave Thaksin an opportunity.

Most remarkably, Thaksin has implemented (or tried to implement) every item on his electoral platform. He has given debt relief, dished out village funds, and rolled out cheap health care. He has set up committees to deal with the problems of the Assembly of the Poor. He has delivered on other promises to NGOs and social leaders, such as the community forestry bill.

Of course, not everything has worked. To his credit, Thaksin said he did not expect these programmes to succeed at the first try. When you do anything new, you make mistakes. The important thing is to make a start, he said, and then learn by doing.

The Democrats are still struggling to understand the change. They protest: we also offered debt relief, village funds, and cheap health care. They ask: what’s the difference? The answer is simple. The Democrats asked people to sit quietly and trust the bureaucrats and politicians to look after their interests. Demands and protests, the Democrats huffed, will get you nowhere. This was the old bureaucratic paternalism. Thaksin talked to the disgruntled, displayed his 3-point program on every street-corner, and asked people to vote on it. This was an invitation to a new kind of electoral participation. And it struck a chord.

But reform disrupts bureaucratic habits, confronts vested interests, and breaks people’s rice-bowls. Those affected resist.

Some of the strongest opposition is inside Thaksin’s own party. At the election, Thaksin also played Thailand’s traditional ‘money politics’ with a lot more money than ever before. He log-rolled old political bosses into the party. TRT candidates scattered red notes around as well as anyone. It was the combination of the new (electoral platform) and the old (money politics) which gave TRT its landslide. Lots of old political bosses who remained outside TRT got wiped out. Those that entered the party tended to win.

The TRT MPs fall into two roughly equal groups. Half are ex-MPs with an average age in the mid-50s. The other half are new faces with an average age in the mid-30s. These two groups represent different generations, different attitudes. The same division is reflected in the cabinet. Several ministers are old-style money politicians who treat politics primarily as a commercial proposition. For them, reform is a threat.

It’s also a threat to bureaucrats who resent popular demands. Take Pak Mun dam. All along, the project owner, EGAT, has refused to accept that the dam is a financial nonsense and environmental disaster. It rejected the expert findings of the World Commission on Dams. It made ads claiming rivers could flow uphill. The protesters’ camp was burnt by vigilantes. When Thaksin’s Cabinet approved the request to open the sluice gates to let fish stocks revive, EGAT simply refused to comply. Forced to relent, it churned out PR designed to undermine independent research about the impact on the fisheries.

Other attempts to negotiate popular demands have run into similar bureaucratic opposition. As a result, the Assembly is back on the road again, tramping its way from Ubon to Bangkok.

The key stress point in this growing clash between the new politics and the old are the ministers hand-picked to implement reform. Kasem Wattanachai quit as education minister after confronting the enormous resistance mounted by the education bureaucracy. Purachai Piumsomboon is being hounded because his clean-up campaign affects the police, protection racketeers, and entertainment mafia. Surapong Suebwonglee is under pressure because he questioned male sexual prerogatives. Praphat Panyachartrak, who is responsible for much of the rural reform agenda, had to fend off an attempt to discredit him as a land-grabber.

These attacks will get worse. And they will gradually expose the limitations of Thaksin’s electoral revolution. TRT is not a movement. The party has a nice website overflowing with policies, but it doesn’t have a mass base. It fits the mould of other Thai parties of the last two decades—a party built round one man, his bank account, and his family and friends. It doesn’t provide any institutional link between the mass support which TRT tapped in the elections, and the day-to-day working of parliament and government. Thaksin is not a ‘man of the people’. Indeed he is one of the most atypical people in the whole nation. So the mass support which put him in power in January amounts to a short-term deal not a long-term contract.

Over time, the old political hands in TRT grow stronger because they know how to play the games of day-to-day politics. The bureaucrats and vested interests opposed to reform slide in alongside the old political hands because they are old friends and know how to work together. If Purachai or any other reform minister falls, it will seem like a row of dominoes. If the reformers agree to compromise for survival, the dominoes will fall in the dark. TRT will look more and more like other "Messiah parties" of recent years (Chamlong’s Palang Tham and Chavalit’s New Aspiration). Thaksin will survive, because the new constitution strengthens the premier, because the Democrats are in disarray, because he has more cash, and because TRT will retain some goodwill from its limited electoral revolution.

But where will the soul of TRT have gone?