By Hannah Beech
Meet the idealist who may well become Thailand's next Prime Minister. As head of Thailand's oldest political party, the Democrats, Abhisit has emerged as an early front-runner in elections slated for December. Yet history has taken an ironic twist for the now 43-year-old politician. The upcoming polls are the handiwork of the very military whose overthrow spurred Abhisit's political passions more than three decades ago. After deposing Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a bloodless army coup last September, Thailand's ruling junta promised to restore democracy by the end of this year. Now that the new constitution overseen by the generals has won a 58% approval rating in a referendum on Aug. 19, the junta appears committed to carrying out its pledge to hold elections by year's end. But Thaksin, who has been charged with corruption, is in exile, living mostly in London, while top members of his Thai Rak Thai Party have been banned from politics after a junta-appointed tribunal convicted them of electoral fraud in May. That leaves the Democrats in their strongest position since losing power to Thaksin back in 2001. Hardly a cocky politician, Abhisit is predicting success in December. "I believe that democracy will reward the Democrats," he says with a bashful grin.
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Let's see: The Democrats couldn't win two elections last year: they boycotted the first election because they knew they would lose and then gleefully supported the the military coup before the election scheduled in October because they knew they would lose again.
Abhisit is a joke. He doesn't stand for democracy. He hates democracy and his record is clear on the subject. Not only that, as far as public policy goes, besides supporting boycotts, coups and conspiracy theories, I still don't know what the Democrat Party platform is.
My prediction is that unless the Democrats ally themselves with a general's party, which will have the full force of the state backing it, they will lose again.
Thaksin on 112
6 hours ago
4 comments:
You blast Abhisit because he knew he couldn't win a rigged general election?
Get real. That's like saying the military junta's constitution actually garnered a 58% YES vote.
You can't have you're cake and stuff it in your pie hole at the same time. Which is it?
Wado
Fonzi, you just lost it. For a long time this blog has been becoming little more than an apologist for that crook Thaksin, but to publish this rant is too much. You know full well the Democrats (and any other party) couldn't win last year because your hero Thaksin subverted the entire electoral system as well as the entire government. In your obsessive admiration for Thaksin, you arent even being rational any more, it is a great pity.
Rich
How could Abhisit know that he was running in a rigged election before the election took place?
Statistically speaking, I don't see how the Democrats could have won anything, even if the elections were pure and free from all taint.
Outside the South and a few districts in Bangkok, the Dems have no power. They have always been a minority party.
Rich, if being a defender of constitutionalism and the rule of law makes me a Thaksin apologist, then so be it.
For the record, I have never apologized for Thaksin once in this entire blog.
Rich, if you wish to live in a world where coups are justifiable, especially after what happened in the last century when all hell broke loose with militarism, Nazism, fascism and communism, that is up to you. Then you stand on the side with the rule of the jungle where constitutions are nothing but toilet paper.
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