Asia's Fickle Elites
Sept. 22, 2006 — -- This week's scenes from Bangkok resembled a throwback to another era: tanks manning city crossroads, bland patriotic music on television, a uniformed general promising to "improve" the political system. All this while the nation's elected prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, was halfway across the globe preparing to address the United Nations General Assembly.
Thaksin's ouster by the clumsily named Council for Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy, a group of army officers backed tacitly by King Bhumibol Adulyadej, comes as a jolt for democracy in Southeast Asia.
With a robust economy, feisty press, regular elections and an army that hadn't meddled directly in politics for 14 years, Thailand appeared to be the country in the region most likely to evolve into a full-fledged modern democracy. Instead, the coup -- redolent of Islamabad in 1999 and Manila two years later -- reminds us that though Asian elites often pay lip service to democracy, they aren't always willing to live with its consequences.
For the past five years, those consequences for Thailand have been personified by Thaksin, the folksy cop-turned-billionaire telecoms tycoon who is simultaneously the country's most popular and most polarizing politician.
In 2001, Thaksin and his Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) party surged to power with a populist message aimed at the country's rural poor. Thaksin went on to become the first elected Thai prime minister to serve a full term and the first to win a second. In April, he drew 16 million votes -- 61 percent of those cast -- in an election marred by an opposition boycott and eventually annulled by the courts. The near certainty that he would win decisively again in elections scheduled for November appears to have triggered the coup.
The Thaksin phenomenon goes to the heart of the tension between elites and masses in poor countries. The deposed leader's formula of debt forgiveness, village development and low cost health care won him an electorally impregnable following. But at the same time, he alienated Bangkok's elites with his crude attempts to use advertising and defamation suits to cow the media, and his effort to pack the army and government with cronies.
For many, the final straw on the proverbial camel's back came earlier this year when Thaksin's relatives engineered a tax-free $1.9 billion sale to Singaporean investors of his telecommunications firm, Shin Corp. An endless cycle of protests began that ended in the events of the past week.
Sadanand Dhume, a former correspondent of the Far Eastern Economic Review and The Asian Wall Street Journal, is a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the Asia Society.
