Responding to the Puea Thai Party election victory

One election victory in a North-eastern province doesn’t necessarily change the political landscape. However, if the government partner party, Phum Jai Thai (PJT), had won, PPT readers can be sure that Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and the forces behind him would have been crowing. Most especially banned politician and Thai Rak Thai (TRT) Party turncoat Newin Chidchob would have been claiming a personal victory over his former comrades.

That the Puea Thai (PT) candidate trounced the PJT candidate is likely to be very disturbing for the forces that engineered the PJT-Democrat alliance government.

Yesterday’s reporting in the Bangkok Post (22 June 2009) was revealing as the Post editorialists seemed to display their Establishment fears. In reporting the PT victory, the Post (“Puea Thai wins in a landslide”) went out of its way to claim that this result was born of little other than “Thaksin fever.” They also claimed irregularities in the voting. In fact, before the election, this latter claim was mainly heard in accusations by PT against PJT.

In its editorial (Bangkok Post, 22 June 2009: “Doubts mar by-election”), the editorial writer claims so much electoral fraud that the Electoral Commission (EC)must “step forcefully into the [Sakon Nakhon’s] Constituency 3 aftermath.”

In fact, responding to PT claims about unusual early voting patterns, the EC has already begun investigating and presumably their officers routinely report from the electoral battle ground. But – shock, horror – it is only PJT’s titular leader and Minister of the Interior Chavarat Charnvirakul who is being investigated.

The Post goes on to claim that the PT winner needs to be investigated as a “nominee” as she is the wife of the previously banned candidate. Of course, there is no mention of all the similar nominees in PJT, some of whom are ministers.

No mention also of the bombs that disrupted PT meetings.

The Bangkok Post editorialist claims that elections need to be seen to be fair. That’s true, but it seems that the Establishment view is that PT could not have won if it was a fair election. What they can’t accept is that for all of the propaganda and money the current government, its supporters and the military-ISOC have thrown at the North-east, they can’t seem to get people to change the way they are voting.

Thaksin and TRT’s policies certainly remain popular in these areas, but so too does the broader red-shirt movement and the now deeply ingrained impulse to keep voting for the parties they really want. This is going to be difficult for the Democrat-led government to overturn and PPT wonders if there won’t be more repression and more political measures to inhibit the red shirts.

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