Asia-Pacific, Civil Society, Headlines, Human Rights

POLITICS-THAILAND: Thaksin’s Pro-Poor Legacy May Last

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 3 2006 (IPS) - By resigning Tuesday as the leader of his party, deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra has confirmed that he will put on ice the abrasive politics he became known for during his five years in government.

And the means Thaksin chose to announce his quitting as the Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thai -TRT) party chief was emblematic of the dramatic change in his fortunes. The tycoon who had made millions as a champion of modern communications and state-of-the-art technology informed his party that he was quitting as its leader in a two-and-a-half page handwritten letter.

”I must resign because of the new environment,” stated the missive that had been faxed to the party headquarters in Bangkok on Tuesday morning from London, where Thaksin has sought refuge since the Sep. 19 coup. ‘’I have to do this to keep the party alive.”

‘’Thanks for making it a party of the people, with more than 14 million members who had confidence in us to form a government for two terms,” added the letter, which was read out by Phongthep Thepkanjana, deputy leader of the TRT.

Thaksin’s resignation as leader of the party he formed in July 1998, which has since become the largest political party ever in Thailand, came in the wake of a mass exodus of high ranking TRT parliamentarians on Monday. By Tuesday morning there were close to 70 resignations, with more expected to follow.

Such an eventuality hardly surprises analysts here, since the twice-elected Thaksin government was driven out of power by the tanks and troops that rolled into Bangkok to widespread cheers and support of many Thai citizens. The anger directed at the Thaksin administration for alleged corruption, nepotism and abuse of power by its critics strengthened the hand of the junta to impose tough measures to break the back of the TRT.

A ban on all activity by political parties was among the first announcements by the junta after ousting 57-year-old Thaksin who was abroad on that September night. After that, the junta declared that members of any political party found to have violated election laws would be banned from politics for five years.

Yet as sections of Thailand celebrate the moment, including headlines as ‘’TRT sinking like Titanic” in Tuesday’s edition of ‘The Nation’, there is a case being made by some analysts and pro-poor activists that man and the party may be gone but the impact the TRT has made since 2001 may continue for years.

For one, Thaksin’s TRT identified a political agenda with clearly defined policy goals to campaign on. ‘’Whether you like him or not, he tried to change the face of Thai politics by setting a political agenda for his party,” Laurent Malespine, a former journalist and longtime analyst of Thai politics, told IPS. ‘’It was unlike other political parties, that often campaigned around the personalities of its members.”

The list of issues they took up in the election campaigns- and addressed after winning the polls- means that ‘’other political parties have to change the way they do politics in the future,” added the French national. ‘’It will be impossible to do politics without an agenda.”

On this list was a promise made ahead of the 2001 parliamentary elections to improve the conditions of Thailand’s poor, which was considered ‘’revolutionary” at the time. ‘’The first declared policy of the TRT was to fight poverty. That was the first time in Thai political history that a party had given such prominence to the poor,” Bantorn Ondam, advisor to the Assembly of the Poor, a coalition of rural and urban grass roots groups, told IPS. ‘’It was revolutionary in Thai politics.”

This departure from the norm was welcomed by the poor, he added, because it is ‘’very difficult for Thais to take a stand in favour of the poor because of the country’s feudal mentality.” Political parties before the TRT’s arrival preferred ‘’the patronage system of doing small favours for the poor and always keeping the concerns of the poor to the last, not a first priority.”

And in the years after such pledges were made, the results were evident across large swathes of north and north-eastern Thailand, home to the country’s rural poor. ‘’Thais living in poverty had dropped to 7.08 million from 13 million” four years after the TRT was first voted to power, states the World Bank in its 2005 ‘Thailand Economic Monitor’. And agriculture incomes in the poorest section of the country’s north-east ‘’rose by 40 percent during the same four-year term.”

Consequently, the TRT enjoyed the rewards of its pro-poor policies, which included debt moratorium for farmers, an easier loan scheme to boost village economies and a universal health care scheme, at the polls. Thailand’s urban and rural poor came out in millions to back the TRT in the 2001 and 2005 polls that made it a dominant political force the likes of which had not been seen since Thailand became a constitutional monarchy in 1932. In 2005, Thaksin formed a government after his party secured 377 of the 500 seats in parliament.

That marked a high point for Thailand’s 23rd prime minister 12 years after he made a foray into national politics following the fortune he had made as a telecommunications tycoon. In 1994-95, as a member of the Palang Dharma Party, which was part of a coalition government, he served as Thailand’s foreign minister. In 1998, he formed the TRT at a time when Thailand was reeling under the 1997 financial crisis and there was anger at the old political order and neo-liberal economic policies that it had endorsed.

And if the TRT’s thumping 2001 victory was a watershed, ensuring one party having a sufficient majority to govern for the first time, unlike the string of fragile coalitions that had been the pattern before, what followed was even more dramatic. The words that came to describe the political reality in the next five years capture this, such as the ‘’Thaksinization of Thailand” and the ‘’Thaksin phenomenon.”

Yet, it was Thaksin’s complete monopoly over Thai politics, public institutions and the economy due to electoral power of his TRT that was also his undoing. ‘’There was a lack of sincerity in his statements and actions that eroded the trust the urban classes had for him,” Sunai Phasuk, Thai researcher for the New York-based Human Rights Watch, told IPS. ‘’And it was these people who led the protests since the beginning of this year to bring Thaksin down.”

Most troubling to this politically influential and vocal constituency was the spate of corruption scandals that was seen as the result of the TRT’s stranglehold on power. ‘’Unchecked corruption linking the TRT proved that the prime minister had been dishonest,” added Sunai. ‘’It affected the very foundations of his popularity.”