Watching absolutism

A Blog Post by Joshua Kurlantzick at the Council on Foreign Relations, “Debate about the Monarchy Continues to Roil Thailand,” is actually a link to an interview with him at 112 Watch.

Readers get the tenor of the interview in the first response to a question on King Vajiralongkorn:

This king clearly has taken Thailand farther from being a constitutional monarchy, which it never truly was under Rama IX…. Instead, King Vajiralongkorn, with the support of some of his advisors and some arch-royalists, has moved the monarchy back in the direction of the absolute monarchy that existed before the revolution of 1932. His moves to directly intervene in an election, to take personal control of assets under the Crown Property Bureau, worth probably at least US$30 billion if not more [PPT: in fact, a lot more]…, to demand changes to the constitution and also full prostration, all suggest a slide toward absolute monarchy.

There’s some gobbledygook about the dead king, then the assessment of Vajiralongkorn continues:

I do not think Rama X can take Thailand all the way back to absolute monarchy, but he has moved the royal institution in that direction. Lacking such popular support, though, it is hard to tell whether Rama X, despite all the power he has amassed, might actually undermine the monarchy in the long-term….

Kurlantzick seems oddly enamored of the dead king. For example, when he says “There had been an undercurrent of anger at the monarchy since the transition…”, we assume he means succession, but he’s wrong, ignoring a longer period of anger about the monarchy that had its most recent incarnation from 2006, when the palace’s role in the military coup was clear.