Thai Intelligent News

The Yellow-shirted PAD have armed guards which have repeatedly shot at opponents. They constantly use violence and now demand “joint patrols” with the police. The PAD has constantly broken the law, and yet they are untouchable. On the rare occasion when PAD leaders are forced to attend court, they are given bail and allowed to go back and commit the same crimes over and over again.

The majority of the Thai population, who are poor, face a double whammy. First, the elite royalists are doing everything possible to take away their basic democratic rights. Secondly, mass job losses are occurring among workers in the tourist industry as a result of the airport blockade. Jobs in agriculture and electronics are also affected and of course we are faced with the serious world economic crisis. The elites do not care if the Thai economy is trashed and Thailand returns to a poor third world nation. In such nations the elites continue to live the same lives as the rich in the developed world. The PAD protestors are middle-class extremists who do not have to go to work, hence their prolonged protests.

We are constantly told by the conservatives that the poor are too stupid to deserve the right to vote. The army staged a coup in 2006 and rewrote the constitution in order to reduce the democratic space and also to absolve themselves of any wrongdoing. The electorate have repeatedly voted in overwhelming numbers for the government party, whether it be Thai Rak Thai, which brought the former Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, or its successor, Peoples Power Party. Now People’s Power politicians are moving to the new Pua Thai Party. Will a fair election be held? Or will the elites engineer a “fix” to make sure that their people win?

• What is the root cause of this crisis?

The root cause of this crisis is not the corruption of the Thaksin government in the past. It isn’t about vote-buying, good governance, civil rights or the rule of law. Politicians of all parties, including the Democrats, are known to buy votes. The elites, whether politicians, civil servants or the military, have a history of gross corruption. Even when they don’t break the law, they have become rich on the backs of Thai workers and small farmers. The Democrat Party is stuffed with such millionaires.

Ironically, the Thai Rak Thai party was helping to reduce the importance of vote-buying because it was the first party in decades to have real policies which were beneficial to the poor. They introduced a universal health care scheme and Keynesian village funds. People voted on the basis of such policies. The Democrats and the conservative elites hate the alliance between Thaksin’s business party and the poor. They hate the idea that a government was using public funds to improve the lives of the poor. This is why the anti-government alliance is against democracy. The PAD have suggested reducing the number of elected MPs and a recipe to do away with the principle of “one person one vote”. So the root cause of the problem is the conservative elite’s contempt for the poor and their contempt for democracy. They are prepared to break the law when it suits them.

• What is the solution?

Business leaders and the royalist elites are demanding an un-elected national government. The Democrat Party leader has “volunteered” to provide the Prime Minister! Such a national government would complete the judicial coup for the rich. It would be a victory for the PAD and a defeat for the electorate.

The Red Shirts, who are organized by government politicians, are the only hope for Thai democracy. They have now become a genuine pro-democracy mass movement of the poor. This is what is meant by “civil society”, not the PAD fascists. Thai academia fails to grasp this basic fact. But the Red Shirts are not a pure force. Many have illusions about ex-Prime Minister Thaksin. They overlook his gross abuse of human rights in the south and the war on drugs, in which hundreds of people were shot as drug dealers without arrest, trial or proof. But these human rights issues are also totally ignored by the PAD and their friends.

Throughout this three-year crisis, the majority of the Thai NGO movement (especially the NGO-Coordinating Committee) has failed to support democracy. Many welcomed the 2006 military coup. Many supported the military constitution. Now they are either silent or are echoing the demands of the army chief, who said last week that the government should resign.

At no point have they attempted to build a pro-democracy social movement. Many believe that the poor are “uneducated and lack enough information to vote”. The honorable examples are the Midnight University in Chiang-Mai, some sections of the labour movement, groups of new generation NGO activists and Turn Left.

• The economic crisis

Millions of jobs are being destroyed by the world economic crisis and the unrest in Thai society. People are being driven back into poverty. Yet the Democrat Party, the military, the conservative elites and the mainstream NGO movement do not have a clue or do not care one jot about the necessary policies to defend the living standards of the poor. They chant about the King’s Sufficiency Economy and the need for fiscal discipline. In other words, the poor must trim their spending and learn to live with their poverty while the rich continue to live in luxury.

We desperately need massive government spending on infrastructure, job protection and a serious expansion of welfare. The value-added tax should be reduced or abolished and higher direct taxes should be levied on all the rich elites without exception. The bloated military budget should be cut. Wages should be raised among workers. Poor farmers should be protected. This will only happen in a climate of genuine democracy. This is why we must oppose this second “coup for the rich”.

Giles Ji Ungpakorn is an associate professor at the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. He regularly comments on Thai affairs

• Thailand’s Vicious Circle

washington post 7/12/2008

The opposition succeeds in ousting yet another government — which is likely to be replaced by one much like it.

THAILAND’S People’s Alliance for Democracy made clear long ago that it stands not for democracy or the Thai people but against them. On Tuesday, it claimed another victory in its campaign to replace the democratic system with a royalist autocracy and to substitute the judgment of the military and an allied elite for that of the people. Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat, whose party won a fair democratic election last December, was forced from office by a questionable court ruling even as thousands of members of the “people’s alliance” barricaded two of Thailand’s airports, stranding hundreds of thousands of travelers. Mr. Wongsawat had been in power only two months; his predecessor was ousted in September by an equally curious and convenient court ruling, not long after alliance members occupied the prime minister’s offices.

The anti-democratic movement has evolved a simple tactic: use force to paralyze the government, the capital city, or the country (via its vital airports), then wait for the military, the courts, or King Bhumibol Adulyadej to intervene. In addition to forcing the past two prime ministers from office, the strategy prompted a military coup in 2006 and an earlier intervention by the king. Yet the larger objective of the alliance remains unrealized and probably unattainable. Thailand’s elite would like to destroy the populist political movement of exiled former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and disenfranchise the mostly poor and rural voters who have repeatedly empowered him or his surrogates in democratic elections.

The latest coup seems no more likely to accomplish that goal than the previous ones. Supporters of Mr. Thaksin, anticipating that their party would be banned (for the second time), already had formed a new one. They say they are ready to elect another Thaksin supporter as prime minister. If a new general election is held, as the army commander recently suggested, there’s no reason to expect the outcome to be different from the previous three elections: a victory for Mr. Thaksin. The only long-term result of the Alliance for Democracy’s campaign is the weakening of the Thai economy and a growing incidence of violence. Seven people were killed in bomb attacks and street battles during the latest siege.

Like traditional elites elsewhere in the developing world, Thailand’s onetime governing class has been discomfited as democracy and globalization have brought long-excluded populations into the political system. Populism doesn’t usually produce good government, and populists don’t always respect the rule of law. But Thailand’s “alliance for democracy” is offering the rest of the world a vivid demonstration of why force cannot succeed in undoing the populists’ advance.

• Thai court rewards criminality

Awzar Thi UPI Asia 6/12/2008

Hong Kong, China — History repeated itself in Thailand this week when a top court for the second time in as many years dissolved the biggest political party, along with two of its partners, and effectively banned its leader and executive members from politics.

The Constitutional Court, which inherited the job from an interim tribunal that issued a similar order against the former ruling party last May, unanimously disbanded the three coalition partners in accordance with section 237 of the 2007 Constitution.

Under this remarkable clause, which an unelected panel wrote into the charter on behalf of the 2006 coup makers, political parties must be dissolved if it can be shown that they failed to prevent electoral offences from occurring in their ranks.

In football, this would be the equivalent of a rule that if one player gets a red card, the whole team is disqualified from the league, with the captain and coach sent into early retirement.

The ruling allowed the political extremists, who had brought thousands of human shields to occupy the airports for a week, to declare victory and go home in time for the king’s birthday on Friday.

Irrespective of the formal grounds for the sentence, in timing and content it has been perceived as endorsing the extremists’ ideology and goals. In effect, the court has indicated that while vote buying cannot be tolerated, hijacking public facilities, vandalizing property, shooting at people and vehicles, illegally detaining fellow citizens, attacking state officers and setting up a proxy police force not only can be tolerated but can even be rewarded.

Perhaps appropriately, the verdict was handed down with pro-government demonstrators outside calling the judges stooges, forcing them to change venue and smashing a generator to shut off their electricity supply. The aggressive public attacks on the court and its personnel are unusual for Thailand, and speak not only to the intensity of the current conflict but also to how far vested interests have drawn the judiciary into the fray.

The judges insisted that having found the politicians guilty of wrongdoing they had no alternative other than to dissolve the three parties. But is this true? Could they not, in principle at least, have done otherwise?

One problem is that the court was called to decide on a narrow legal question that was itself predicated upon a series of other significant political and judicial events over the last couple of years.

As has been customary in Thailand, the top courts did nothing in response to the 2006 military takeover, and allowed themselves to be used for its purposes. The May 2007 judgment tacitly endorsed the regime, and the court that sat this week was set up under the regressive Constitution that followed in its wake. This September, in an equally surreal judgment, it sacked the prime minister for cooking on television.

The court could not contradict the earlier rulings. Nor could it call into question the contents of the section upon which the fate of the government hung, and which the Parliament had been set to amend last month.

But that does not mean that it had no alternative. Judges around the world have often refused to rule on pressing political questions, aware that to do so would damage the fragile public confidence in their work and threaten their integrity.

Perhaps the most significant case of this sort in recent years was that which handed George W. Bush his first term as U.S. president.

Although the Supreme Court then made itself responsible for sorting out the mess caused by ballot problems in Florida, four dissenting judges warned that it had been dragged into an issue that it could not satisfactorily resolve and to which it did not belong. One of them, Justice Stephen Breyer, recounted an important lesson from history to explain why.

In 1876, a panel was established to figure out who had won that year’s presidential election. Five of the 15 members were judges. They were expected, as in so many things in Thailand these days, to lend an air of impartiality and fairness.

One of the justices cast the deciding vote. The losing party accused him of accepting bribes, and he was widely lambasted. But whether he was dishonest or not is beside the point for the purposes of the historical lesson, Breyer made clear. What matters was that the presence of the judges did not give the panel more legitimacy.

“Nor did it assure the public that the process had worked fairly, guided by the law,” he wrote.

“Rather, it simply embroiled Members of the Court in partisan conflict, thereby undermining respect for the judicial process.”

History has vindicated Breyer and his dissenting peers. Public esteem of the U.S. Supreme Court has slipped to perhaps its lowest level in decades, as a result of the judgment in favor of Bush over Al Gore, and other judgments since. The court may have put someone in government, but as in 1876 it did not give credibility to that person or government. It merely brought more censure and dispute to its own doors.

Thailand’s Constitutional Court has again taken someone out of government, but it too has not added credibility to anyone or anything. Instead, it has once more played the fool, and once more made a mockery of the justice that it purportedly represents.

Did it have an alternative? Of course it did. It could, and should, simply have refused to decide. That it didn’t is not for want of an alternative. It’s because it wasn’t looking for one.

(Awzar Thi is the pen name of a member of the Asian Human Rights Commission with over 15 years of experience as an advocate of human rights and the rule of law in Thailand and Burma. His Rule of Lords blog can be read at http://ratchasima.net/)

• The Economist: The king and them

The untold story of the palace’s role behind the collapse of Thai democracyTHAILAND’S tourism business, its export industries and its reputation have been wrecked by recent events. Crowds of royalists have occupied the government’s offices for months and then seized Bangkok’s airports. The police refused to evict them. The army refused to help. This week the siege was ended after the courts disbanded three parties in the ruling coalition. But the parties plan to re-form under new names and continue governing, so fresh strife threatens. It is as if a thin veneer of modernity, applied during the boom of the 1980s and early 1990s, has peeled away. Until recently a beacon of Asian pluralism, Thailand is sliding into anarchy.

The conflict began three years ago as peaceful rallies against corruption and abuse of power in the government of Thaksin Shinawatra. The protesters, wearing royal-yellow shirts and accusing Mr Thaksin of being a closet republican, got their way when royalist generals removed him in the coup of 2006. But on democracy’s restoration last year, Thais elected a coalition led by Mr Thaksin’s allies. The yellow-shirts of the inaptly named People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) revived their protests and adopted increasingly thuggish tactics, prompting Mr Thaksin’s supporters to don red shirts and fight back.

• Speak it not

Throughout this conflict, the great unmentionable, not just for the Thai press but also for most foreign reporters, has been the role of King Bhumibol, his family and their closest courtiers. The world’s most ferociously enforced law against lèse-majesté (offending the crown) prevents even the mildest discussion of the palace’s role in Thai public life. Such laws are mostly in disuse elsewhere, but Thailand’s was harshened in the 1970s. Absurdly, anyone can bring a lèse-majesté suit. The police have to take seriously the most trivial complaints. All this makes the law a useful tool for politicians and others seeking a way to damage their foes. Often, the press is not allowed to explain the nature of any supposed offence against the crown, so Thais have no way to tell whether it really was so disrespectful.

The lèse-majesté law is an outrage in itself. It should not be enforced in any country with democratic pretensions. Worse is that the law hides from Thais some of the reasons for their chronic political woes. For what the king himself calls the “mess” Thailand is in stems in many ways from his own meddling in politics during his 62-year reign (see article). In part, the strife also reflects jockeying for power ahead of the succession. With the king celebrating his 81st birthday on December 5th, that event looms ever larger.

Much of the story of how the king’s actions have hurt his country’s politics is unfamiliar because Thais have not been allowed to hear it. Some may find our criticisms upsetting, but we do not make them gratuitously. Thailand needs open debate if it is to prepare for the time when a less revered monarch ascends the throne. It cannot be good for a country to subscribe to a fairy-tale version of its own history in which the king never does wrong, stays above politics and only ever intervenes on the side of democracy. None of that is true.

The official version of Thai history dwells on episodes such as the events of 1992, when Bhumibol forced the resignation of a bloodstained dictator and set his country on course for democracy. But many less creditable royal interventions have gone underreported and are seldom discussed. In 1976, paranoid about the communist threat, the king appeared to condone the growth of the right-wing vigilante movement whose members later took part in the slaughter of unarmed student protesters. In the cold war America saw Bhumibol as a staunch ally and helped finance his image-making machine. This long-standing alliance and the fierce lèse-majesté law have led Western diplomats, academics and journalists to bite their tongues and refrain from criticism.

After the 2006 coup, the 15th in Bhumibol’s reign, officials tried to tell foreigners that protocol obliged the king to accept the generals’ seizure of power. Thais got the opposite message. The king quickly granted the coupmakers an audience, and newspapers splashed pictures of it, sending Thais the message that he approved of them. In truth the king has always been capable of showing his displeasure at coups when it suited him, by rallying troops or by dragging his feet in accepting their outcome. And he exerts power in other ways. Since 2006, when he told judges to take action on the political crisis, the courts seem to have interpreted his wishes by pushing through cases against Mr Thaksin and his allies—most recently with this week’s banning of the parties in the government.

• No fairy-tale future

In the imagination of Thai royalists their country is like Bhutan, whose charismatic new king is adored by a tiny population that prefers royal rule to democracy. In reality, with public anger at the queen’s support for the thuggish PAD and the unsuitability of Bhumibol’s heir simmering, Thailand risks the recent fate of Nepal, which has suffered a bitter civil war and whose meddling king is now a commoner in a republic. The PAD was nurtured by the palace and now threatens to engulf it. An enduring image of the past few days is that of PAD toughs shooting at government supporters while holding up the king’s portrait. The monarchy is now, more clearly than ever, part of the problem. It sits at the apex of a horrendously hierarchical and unequal society. You do not have to be a republican to agree that this needs to be discussed.

As The Economist went to press, on the eve of the king’s birthday, he was reported to be unwell, and unable to deliver his usual annual speech to the nation. So he had still not repudiated the yellow-shirts’ claims to be acting in his name. His long silence has done great damage to the rule of law in Thailand. He could still help, by demanding, as no one else can, the abolition of the archaic lèse-majesté law and the language in the current charter that supports it, and so enable Thais to have a proper debate about their future. He made a half-hearted stab at this in 2005, saying he should not be above criticism. But nothing short of the law’s complete repeal will do. Thailand’s friends should tell it so.

• Thailand’s king and its crisis

Thailand’s interminable political conflict has much to do with the taboo subject of its monarchy. That is why the taboo must be brokenEVEN the most revered of kings, worshipped by his people as a demigod, is not immortal. Thais were reminded of this last month when six days of ornate cremation ceremonies, with gilded carriages and armies of extras in traditional costumes, were held for Princess Galyani, the elder sister of their beloved King Bhumibol Adulyadej (pictured above). There was talk in Bangkok of the princess’s funeral being a “dress rehearsal” for the end of Bhumibol’s reign, 62 years long so far. Making one of few public appearances this year, shortly before his 81st birthday on December 5th, the king did indeed look his age.

The funeral only briefly calmed a political conflict that has raged for three years between supporters of Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister ousted by royalist generals in the 2006 coup, and an opposition movement backed by much of Bangkok’s traditional elite, apparently including Queen Sirikit. But the day after the ceremonies ended a grenade exploded among anti-Thaksin protesters, killing one. The anti-government protesters, the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), who had been occupying Government House since August, then seized Bangkok’s main airports, causing chaos. The siege was lifted only eight days later, after a court dissolved the main parties in the pro-Thaksin coalition government.

Mr Thaksin is in exile, convicted in absentia of corruption. But a government dominated by his allies has governed since democracy returned in last December’s elections. It looks poised to carry on under new party names despite the court ruling. Last month Mr Thaksin staged a huge rally of his “red shirt” supporters to remind his “yellow shirt” royalist foes in the PAD, who claim to be protecting the king against Mr Thaksin’s supposed republicanism, that he remains Thailand’s most popular politician.

Besides justified concerns about Mr Thaksin’s abuses of power, one of the royalists’ worries is that he was building, through populist policies such as cheap health care and microcredit, a patronage network and popular image that challenged the king’s. Another fear is that Mr Thaksin’s alleged generosity to Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn in the past was intended to build up influence with him once he succeeds to the throne. For these and other reasons, the little-told back-story of King Bhumibol is vital to understanding the predicament of this country of 64m people.

Many Thais will squirm at what follows, and will prefer the fairy-tale version of the king’s story. But the king’s past actions are root causes of a conflict dividing the country, and need to be examined.

Bhumibol’s tale, even if stripped of the mythology his courtiers have spent decades constructing around him, is exceptional. The American-born son of a half-Chinese commoner accidentally inherits a throne close to extinction and revives it, creating one of the world’s most powerful and wealthy monarchies, and surely the only one of any significance to have gained in political power in modern times. The king’s charisma, intelligence, talents (from playing the saxophone to rain-making, a science in which he holds a European patent) and deep concern for his people’s welfare make him adored at home and admired around the world. His image perhaps reaches its zenith in 1992, after the army shoots dozens of pro-democracy protesters in Bangkok, when television shows both the army leader (and prime minister) Suchinda Kraprayoon and the protest leader, Chamlong Srimuang (now a PAD stalwart), kneeling in an audience with him. Shortly afterwards General Suchinda resigns, and the king is given credit for the restoration of democracy.

However, Bhumibol’s story is also that of a king who lost faith in democracy (if he ever really had it), who constantly meddled behind the scenes in politics and thus, in the twilight of his reign, risks leaving behind a country unprepared for life without “Father”, as Thais affectionately call him. Understanding why a country that was until recently a beacon of pluralism in Asia has become such a “mess”, as the king put it in 2006, is impossible without lifting the thick veil of reverence surrounding him.

This is not easy because, paradoxically, a king whose adulation by his subjects is supposedly near-universal is nevertheless deemed to need protection, in the form of the world’s most ferociously enforced lèse-majesté law. Whereas other monarchies have mostly abolished or stopped enforcing such laws, Thailand’s was made harsher in the 1970s. Even the most mild, reasoned criticism of the monarchy is forbidden, punishable by up to 15 years in jail. This has had a remarkable effect not just on Thais but on successive generations of Western diplomats, academics and journalists who, with few exceptions, have meekly censored themselves.

• All the king’s men

The origins of this, in part, were in the Vietnam war, in which America found King Bhumibol a staunch anti-communist ally. Recognising his value as an anti-red icon, America pumped propaganda funds into a campaign to put the king’s portrait in every Thai home. Even today, although quick to decry undemocratic moves in other Asian countries, America rarely protests at the arrests of Thais and foreigners for criticising the monarchy. Foreign journalists and academics need visas and access to officialdom to do their jobs, and thus have played down the royal angle to any story.

As a result of this conspiracy of silence, only one serious biography exists of one of Asia’s most important leaders. “The King Never Smiles”, by Paul Handley, an American journalist (2006), notes that the king’s restoration of the power and prestige of the Thai monarchy “is one of the great untold stories of the 20th century.”

Mr Handley says that in the two intervening years nobody has disputed the main facts in his book; not even the most damning stuff, which explodes the myth that the king rarely intervenes in politics and then only on the side of good. Perhaps his gravest charge is that in 1976 the king seemed to condone the growth of right-wing vigilante groups that, along with the army, were later responsible for the slaughter of peaceful student protesters. As has happened often in modern Thai history (and could easily happen again now), the 1976 unrest was used as a pretext to topple the government and replace it with a royally approved one.

Bhumibol was 18 when he took the throne after the mysterious death of his ineffectual brother, King Ananda, in 1946. He promptly came under the sway of his uncles, princes itching to restore the power and wealth the crown had lost when the absolute monarchy was abolished in 1932. As he grew into his robes in the 1950s he created a comprehensive patronage system. The award of honours in exchange for donations to royal causes made the monarchy the predominant fount of charity. This “network monarchy”, as it was dubbed by Duncan McCargo, a British academic, put the king back at the centre of Thai society and recovered much of his lost power.

A theme now embraced with gusto by the PAD, inspired by the king’s speeches over the years, is that electoral politics is irretrievably filthy and that Thailand would do better with ad hoc rule by royally favoured “good men”. The epitome of these is General Prem Tinsulanonda who, as unelected prime minister in the semi-democracy of the 1980s, did more than anyone else to foster the idea of the king’s near-divinity. Now president of the privy council, General Prem is also supposedly above politics. But this too is a myth: he is widely seen as the mastermind of the 2006 coup. Shortly beforehand he told the army that the king was its “owner” and Mr Thaksin merely a replaceable “jockey”.

• AP Royalists wear yellow

The PAD is a motley bunch, united only by fanatical hatred of Mr Thaksin. It includes disgruntled businessmen, aristocratic ladies, members of a militaristic Buddhist outfit, formerly anti-monarchist intellectuals and reactionary army types. Its “new politics”, consisting of a partly appointed parliament, sweeping powers for military intervention and, of course, a strong crown, is “Premocracy” redux.

The army is a big part of the country’s predicament. Its generals believe they have a right to remove any government that incurs its, or the palace’s, displeasure—taking its cue from the monarchy that has approved so many of its coups. These two obstacles to Thailand’s democratic development are inextricably interlinked.

Mr Handley criticises the way the king has undermined the rule of law. When he has intervened to make known his wishes, his influence is such that it is taken as an order. In an example too late for the book, months before the 2006 coup the king ordered the country’s judges to do something about the political crisis. In a recording of a phone call between two Supreme Court judges shortly afterwards, later posted on the internet, one says they need to avoid the perception that they are following palace orders because “foreigners wouldn’t accept it”.

Since then, their interpretation of the king’s wishes has become increasingly clear, as the courts have rushed through cases against the former prime minister and his allies, while going easy on their critics. Some cases, such as the corruption allegations against Mr Thaksin, clearly deserved the courts’ attention. Others were trivial, such as the court-ordered sacking in September of Samak Sundaravej, the pro-Thaksin prime minister, for doing a television cookery show. In contrast, rebellion charges against the PAD’s leaders over their seizing of Government House were watered down and the courts freed them to continue the occupation.

None of this is to absolve Mr Thaksin and his cronies of their sins. But even his gravest abuse—a “war on drugs” in 2003, in which police were suspected of hundreds of extra-judicial killings—was not entirely his fault. The dirty war against supposed drug-dealers was misguidedly supported by Thais of all social classes. Even the king, in an equivocal speech that year, sounded at times as if he approved of it.

• Father knows best

Other countries, from Spain to Brazil, have overcome dictatorial pasts to grow into strong democracies whose politics is mostly conducted in parliament, not on the streets. Thailand’s failure to follow suit is partly because “Father” has always been willing to step in and sort things out: his children have never quite had to grow up. The Democrats, the parliamentary opposition, are opportunists, cheering on the PAD while seemingly hoping for another royally approved coup to land the government in their lap.

AFP Princess Sirindhorn is preferred…

The rage of Bangkok’s traditional elite against Mr Thaksin stems partly from embarrassment at having originally supported him. When he came to power in 2001 there was a feeling that Thailand needed a strong “CEO” leader, as the former businessman presented himself. His then party, Thai Rak Thai (TRT), was the first in Thai history to win a parliamentary majority on its own, and formed the first elected government to serve a full term, after which it was re-elected. Mr Thaksin’s policies of improved public services and credit for the poor, though self-serving, promised to improve an unequal, hierarchical society: another reason why the old palace-linked elite wants him eliminated.

The government of generals and bureaucrats installed by the 2006 coup-makers performed miserably. In last December’s elections, though TRT had been disbanded, Mr Thaksin’s new People’s Power Party won most seats. This spurred the PAD to resume its protests. In clashes in October PAD members fought the police with guns, bombs and sharp staves, hoping the army would again use disorder as the pretext for a coup. The PAD nevertheless blamed the clashes entirely on police brutality, and the anti-Thaksin Bangkok press let it get away with this. The death of one PAD member, apparently blown up in his car by the bomb he was carrying, was quickly buried. But the death of a young woman, reportedly when a police tear-gas canister exploded, became a cause célèbre.

Up to this point there were only whispers as to why the PAD enjoyed such lenient treatment—even from the army, which refused to help the police remove protesters from government offices. However, rumours of an extremely influential backer were confirmed when Queen Sirikit, attended by a clutch of cameramen, presided over the dead woman’s cremation. The king remained silent.

Nobody can discuss, of course, what effect the queen’s support has had on the majority of Thais who still, apparently, back Mr Thaksin. A whirl of lèse-majesté accusations have been made against pro- and anti-Thaksin figures. But the PAD’s ever more menacing behaviour, the palace’s failure to disown it, and the group’s insistence that Thais must choose between loyalty to Mr Thaksin and to the king, may be doing untold damage to the crown itself. Some of Mr Thaksin’s voters must be contemplating the flip-side of the PAD’s argument: if the monarchy is against the leader they keep voting for, maybe it is against them. Such feelings may only be encouraged by the PAD’s condescending arguments that the rural poor, Mr Thaksin’s main support base, are too “uneducated” to have political opinions, so their voting power must be reduced.

• Bloomberg …to the stiff crown prince

At a pro-Thaksin rally in July a young activist ranted against the monarchy, calling the king “a thorn in the side of democracy” for having backed so many coups, and warning the royal family they risked the guillotine. She was quickly arrested. What shocked the royalist establishment was not just the startling criticism of the king—but that the activist was cheered. “It is more and more difficult for them to hold the illusion that the monarchy is universally adored,” says a Thai academic.

This illusion is crumbling amid growing worry about what happens when the king’s reign ends. The fears over Mr Thaksin’s past influence on the crown prince are overshadowed by far deeper ones about the suitability of the heir to the throne. Vajiralongkorn has shown little of his father’s charisma or devotion to duty, and in his youth suffered from a bad reputation. In a newspaper interview he defended himself against accusations that he was a gangster. But even his mother, in an extraordinary set of interviews on a visit to America in 1981, conceded he was a “bit of a Don Juan”. “If the people of Thailand do not approve of the behaviour of my son, then he would either have to change his behaviour or resign from the royal family,” she said.

The Thai press dutifully self-censored and certainly would not repeat these criticisms now. Nevertheless, the crown prince will probably remain deeply disliked. There has been speculation over the years that the king might pass the crown to the much more popular Princess Sirindhorn, who now does most of his job of touring the country to meet the masses. The 8pm nightly royal news on television constantly shows her, smiling through endless visits and ceremonies, making merit at Buddhist temples and doing other good works. In the crown prince’s rare appearances he looks reluctant and stiff, and is rarely seen meeting ordinary people.

The patrilineal tradition of the Chakri dynasty is unlikely to be broken. And the prominent role played by the crown prince in Princess Galyani’s cremation removed any doubts about whether he was the chosen heir, says a Thai academic. Even so, many Thais, a superstitious people, will remember an old prophecy that the dynasty would last for only nine generations—Bhumibol is the ninth Chakri king—and that a tenth would be a disaster.

Some day my prince…

For all these reasons, a former senior official with strong palace ties says there is a terror of what will come after Bhumibol. “When we say ‘Long live the king’ we really mean it, because we can’t bear to think of what the next step will be,” he says. Most Thais are too young to remember a time before Bhumibol took the throne. His death will be a leap into the unknown. It would seem wise for royal advisers to be doing some succession planning. But, says the former official, none seems to be going on. And any advice offered would probably not be heeded: “The king is his own man. Nobody advises the king,” he says.

In the shorter term, a trigger for renewed confrontation may be, if a pro-Thaksin government survives, its plan to amend the constitution passed during the military regime that followed the 2006 coup. Some mooted changes, such as restoring a fully elected Senate, seem reasonable. But the PAD assumes the main motive is to relieve Mr Thaksin and his allies of the various legal charges against them. Neither side yet seems willing to compromise. Both have made clear their readiness to use street mobs to achieve their ends.

A messy but effective “Thai-style compromise” is still hoped for, to pull the country back from the brink. It is even possible to dream of the red- and yellow-shirt movements transforming themselves into a well-behaved, mainstream two-party system with broad public participation. This, in turn, might help the country escape the dead hand of the courtiers and generals who are trying to drag the country into the past. But none of this is likely.