Thaksin, Abhisit and political alliances

From The Nation

With Thaksin Shinawatra has embarrassed and challenged Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva in recent days, there have been some interesting alliances publicized.

At right, from The Nation’s website, we have “PM Abhisit Vejjajjiva gives a bouquet of flowers to Jittanart Limthongkul, at the launching party of ASTV-Manager daily newspaper Tuesday. Jittanart, owner of the newspaper, is son of Sondhi, core leader of People’s Alliance for Democracy.”

This linking of the government to PAD is a search for allies in the “war” with Thaksin who has recently enlisted Chavalit Yongchaiyudh and a bunch of generals, Hun Sen and the Sultan of Brunei. All have embarrassed and challenged the Democrat Party-led government in recent days.

The government is struggling to respond, so has again decided to get personal and remove Thaksin’s former police rank and his royal decorations. The government had threatened this previously, but hadn’t acted. Their decreasing arsenal of weapons to use against Thaksin still includes the frozen billions, and PPT would expect some government action on that as well.

PAD has long been strong amongst Democrat Party leaders and Abhisit supported PAD strongly in the past. Again being seen as close to PAD and even to Sondhi Limthongkul seems to make political sense to Abhisit as Thaksin has made political gains over the past two weeks. Being anti-Thaksin means that Abhisit needs the support of all nationalist royalists. As the Bangkok Post suggests, there is yet another “closing of the ranks” to fight Thaksin.

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