The election results have revealed a still bitterly polarised Thailand

ANALYSIS / THAI POLITICS

PPP-led govt not a foregone conclusion

The election results have revealed a still bitterly polarised Thailand

By THITINAN PONGSUDHIRAK

Thailand's parliamentary elections have produced a clean winner but an unclear outcome. Despite its almost outright majority and a large margin of victory over its nearest rival, the People Power party's assumption of power as the head of a coalition government is not a foregone conclusion. Several obstacles stand in the PPP's way.

First and foremost, the PPP's occupation of Government House would return Thai politics to the pre-coup era under ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. It would go against everything the putsch has stood for. Mr Thaksin would be poised to return with a good chance to clear his name and reclaim his vast assets that are frozen on corruption charges; the politically banned 111 executives of the dissolved Thai Rak Thai party would be provided with an amnesty and a potential comeback, and the various post-coup investigative agencies would be dismantled.

Beyond these repeated promises of PPP leader Samak Sundaravej, a PPP-led government could do much worse to the coup-makers and their powerful backers behind the scenes, such as political retribution, extirpation of the military's corporate interests, and marginalisation of the its resurgent role in politics.

Indeed, it would be surprising if the generals and their allies accept the PPP-led government without a fight.

Yet the PPP's post-election parliamentary strength is so formidable that it cannot be easily suppressed or outmanoeuvred. And the military is increasingly constrained by international norms.

As democratic rule becomes the only game in town, the days of military coups are numbered. The military's own post-coup ineptitude has also failed to meet public expectations at home.

Such is the military's predicament. It can seize power but is ultimately compelled to end up with a constitution and elections. The negotiations to form a coalition government in the coming days will be overshadowed by this predicament.

Unless the PPP can make a deal that is acceptable to the military, its coalition leadership is problematic.

Second, the PPP won resoundingly on the major scorecard of overall number of MPs. However, it was trounced by the Democrat party in Bangkok, the nerve centre where Thailand's movers and shakers reside. The Bangkok constituency and party-list results are consistent with the ''no votes'' against Mr Thaksin and TRT in the invalidated April 2006 election and with the charter approval in the referendum last August. The opposite was the case in the January 2001 and February 2005 elections, when TRT won 29 and 32 of the 37 MP seats being contested at the time.

The overwhelming loss of Bangkok renders the PPP's mandate incomplete. A PPP-led government would be stable in numbers but missteps such as a procurement scandal or policy-related conflicts of interest and cronyism could bring demonstrators back to the streets all over again.

Just a fraction of the electorate, Bangkok should not play such a disproportionate role. The tragedy of the PPP's support bases is that they comprise poor upcountry folk who constitute the majority but whose voices are faint and obscured by relative poverty and distance from the seat of power.

On the flip side, the PPP's weakness in Bangkok will play into the hands of the Democrats, who can claim a basis of legitimacy in the event it ends up cobbling together a non-PPP coalition. But a Democrat-led coalition without PPP based partly on Bangkok's support would only deepen and intensify Thailand's social polarisation and income disparity.

Likewise, the PPP failed to win the party-list results convincingly.

A significant number of voters apparently split their preferences between the constituency and party-list ballots. The near-even party-list outcome based on popular votes, yielding the top four provincial voting zones to the PPP and the bottom four to its arch-rival, will embolden the Democrats to try to eke out a coalition of its own.

With the odds stacked against it from the outset after the coup, the PPP needed an indisputable win on all three counts, but it only won the big one.

The Democrats are likely to leverage their results on the Bangkok and party-list outcomes to outfox the PPP during the coalition negotiations period, especially if a helpful nudge is forthcoming from the generals and their backers.

The Election Commission's yellow and red cards and consequent reruns in at least a dozen constituencies may boost the Democrats' efforts by reducing the PPP's constituency margin.

Third, a PPP-led coalition would be a frontal assault on the Establishment, pitting the forces and interests of the majority of the electorate against those of a significant minority that includes Bangkok.

Perhaps this is Thailand's inevitable reckoning, a collision course that was bound to arrive on the scene after decades of wilful neglect of the majority by the minority.

Mr Samak's fiery rhetoric and his offensive remarks along with those of other PPP cadres against powerful figures as Privy Council president Gen Prem Tinsulanonda are supportive of this subtle but simmering clash.

The potential confrontation that could come out in the open under a PPP-led coalition is likely to work against the largest winning party. The Democrats will parlay this prospect in their favour by putting up an alternative coalition option to put off the implicit social conflict.

All things being equal, the smaller parties, which will collectively play the role of king-maker, will also find this dramatic clash less appealing than the alternative, especially since the outcome of being in government is more or less the same to them.

Due to the uncompromising self-righteousness of its own making, the PPP already has made itself isolated.

The writer is Director of the Institute of Security and International Studies, Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University.