Resurgent Thaksin?

On Sunday, Thailand's 45 million voters will be asked to choose the country's next leaders. Yet it remains to be seen whether their wishes expressed through Sunday's ballot will be heeded.

Thailand, in the final week of its latest military junta, is nervous and angry. The generals and their royalist civilian allies felt sufficiently threatened by the parvenu -- but politically astute and extremely popular -- former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to topple him with tanks in September 2006. But they are now confronting the alarming possibility that he, or his surrogates, will once again win the vote.

Thakin's popularity resides among Thailand's overwhelmingly poor and mainly rural majority. In the last contested elections in February 2005 Thaksin's now banned Thai Rak Thai (TRT, literally 'Thais love Thais') party placed 374 MPs in the 500-seat lower house of parliament on some 19 million votes. When new polls were called in April 2006, the other parties boycotted the vote. Despite accusations of corruption against Thaksin, some 17 million voters turned out in what became a show of support for him. Five months later the military seized power.

Since the 2006 coup, the country has divided over the putsch's purpose and legacy. For many, all the coup seems to have achieved are measures intended to protect the junta from a revanchist Thaksin. Using compliant courts, the soldiers sought to defend their position by dissolving the TRT and barring more than 100 of its leading politicians from public office for at least five years. Unconvincing efforts were also made to open extradition proceedings with the UK authorities for Thaksin’s arrest and return.

None of these moves appears to have had any impact on Thaksin's power base. Many TRT politicians are drawn from the 1970s generation of leftist students, a cohort raised opposing successive military governments. Out of the ashes of the TRT rose the People's Power Party (PPP). This party is a strange amalgam; it combines the leadership of rightwing populist Samak Sundaravej with the now middle-aged student leftists he excoriated and persecuted 30 years ago.

All credible opinion polls -- including one produced by the police -- indicate the PPP will garner the largest number of parliamentary seats. The junta sought to counter this outcome by ensuring the new constitution prevented the emergence of any one single strong party in favour of a weaker coalition.

The final days ahead of the polls are dense with rumours, omens and political theatre. Many confidently assert the polls will be cancelled due to the security situation. On cue, a warning in the form of an unprimed grenade and a live smoke bomb were hurled into the compound of a PPP office in Bangkok on December 17. The same night Abhisit Vejjajiva, the Oxford-educated leader of the main opposition Democrat party, narrowly escaped serious injury in a car crash.  Further, a Brazilian soothsayer has triggered alarm with prophecies of a tsunami on voting day.

Such portents have deepened a mood of foreboding among many Thais and foreign investors, already concerned that little now stands between serious and protracted instability other than the patience of Thailand’s poor and the willingness of the military and its supporters to abide by the will of the majority.