Back to the future

Quite a while ago PPT posted here and there about the 2014 military junta’s plans for Thailand’s politics.

In summarizing some of these thoughts, back in 2014 we had a post that commented on an article at The Nation by Supalak Ganjanakhundee. His view and ours was that the “quasi-democratic regime under General Prem Tinsulanonda between 1980 and 1988” was the military’s and royalist elite’s preferred “model that would be suitable for Thailand forever.”

Of Premocracy, Supalak stated:

The Prem regime is the role model for many elite political architects. He is a former Army commander who was “invited” by political parties and elected politicians to take the premiership after elections during the 1980s. To that extent, political parties and politicians were only minor parts of the arrangement. They were furniture, rather than the structure of the country’s administration.

Thailand was then mostly run by military officers and bureaucrats. The prime minister had no accountability to the people. His power was supported by the military. Prem faced challenges from young officers and two coup attempts, rather than lawmakers in the House of Representatives. He never gave a damn about the politicians in Parliament. They would create no trouble for his government as long as they were allowed to join the Cabinet.

The 2014 coup, then, was to be yet another effort to embed the preferred political model.

But the junta’s plan owed much to the palace’s man in 1976, Thanin Kraivixien. He was catapulted into the prime ministership in 1976 following a massacre of students and a military coup. The king wanted the right-wing Thanin as premier. He presided over a period of fascist-like repression that was so extreme that even made some in the military leadership wonder if Thanin was damaging the military-monarchy brand.

After the 2014 coup, Thanin provided “advice” to the Prayuth Chan-ocha dictatorship. Indeed, the junta’s 20-year “roadmap” to “democracy” is modeled on Thanin’s 16-year plan for “democracy.” There are other similarities and comparisons that can be made. Among them, the junta’s draft constitution drew inspiration from the Thanin era, with Meechai Ruchupan having served Thanin as well. And, like Prayuth’s regime, Thanin’s dictatorship made excessive use of the lese majeste law to repress political opponents.

Rotten to the core

More significantly, as in the Prem period, we see a regime in decay. Some might say that this also reflects the 1990s, and that’s not wrong as Prem’s regime set the pattern. Parties forming and self-destructing as they bid for ministerial seats and the huge flow of illicit funds that underpinned a decrepit system of vote-buying and provincial gangsterism. Politicians selling themselves to the highest bidder. Politicians, military, and gangsters in cahoots, feeding at the trough of state funds. The state budget became a fund for military aggrandizement and private wealth accumulation by well-connected capitalists. Those capitalists and the military groveling before an ever more powerful monarchy.

All of this is the manner of the current corrupt regime. Did we mention Chinese gangsters? That, at least seems like an “innovation.”

Allowing Gen Prayuth/Prawit to continue in their alliances with gangsters – some of them MPs and many of them police and military brass – guarantees (perhaps) a shaky palace and keeps funds flowing, but it screws the other 65 million Thais.