Published on January 10, 2005

Without leadership, the main opposition party will continue its descent into irrelevance

The Thai Rak Thai Party heads towards the February 6 national election with the greatest of confidence that it will once again win the people’s mandate to return to power for four more years.

Both the Chat Thai and Mahachon parties meanwhile are widely seen as having done their best to polish up whatever shortcomings they may have in order to secure as many parliamentary seats as they can. The same cannot be said of the opposition Democrat Party, the country’s oldest political party. With less than a month until the election date, the party is obviously unable, still, to get its act together. It has sent confusing signals about what it thinks the voters expect it to do. If it remains with its head thus in the sand, the Democrat Party will by default hand over to the TRT its biggest election victory yet to date.

Democrat Party insiders are blaming the lack of a unified election strategy and the absence of an action plan to fix the confused image that the party now has. Six or seven months ago, some Democrats blamed these problems on the mass defection of senior strategists and financiers to the Mahachon Party.

“The people who were doing our strategies went to Mahachon along with what they were supposed to have thought up for us,” said one senior party member.

But with just 27 days to go, the same reason is still being used to justify its lacklustre performance. It appears that absolutely nothing has been done to boost the party’s chances of winning more parliamentary seats. In fact the Democrats now face the prospect of a complete drubbing at the polls, even in the Bangkok constituencies, as well as in the party list, especially with TRT leader Thaksin Shinawatra’s popularity reaching new heights over his handling of the tsunami disaster. (TRT’s internal polls give Thaksin a surge in popularity of 80-90 per cent, with the Democrat Party’s Banyat Bantadhan now standing at a dismal 5 per cent.)

The Democrat Party’s bad performance in the run-up to the election must be considered detrimental to democracy. Its laxity will only add to Thaksin’s already overwhelming confidence that he can do whatever he wants. The voters, especially those in urban areas, do not expect the Democrats to pull off a miracle, but they do expect the party to at least put up a strong showing, sufficient enough to play a check-and-balance role in the power arena.

And if Democrat Party leader Banyat and his supporters think that the party’s arms and legs were cut off in the recent defection of his senior allies to the Mahachon Party, then he should at least accept the lame-duck situation for what it is and attempt to pull up his party up by the bootstraps. Anything is possible in politics, especially in times of crises of confidence like the one that the Democrats are experiencing.

The best way forward would be for the party to depart from the old way of standing behind a strong personality, at least at in terms of its national campaign strategy, and focus on its institutional and policy characteristics.

A lot of Democrats have talked about forming a “shadow” cabinet, which would see each ministerial position matched by an opposition member who could follow up on the issues and speak out with credibility in the run-up to the election.

Adopting this British model would at least give some Democrat candidates a chance to attract more publicity to their policy positions, thereby improving their personal profiles. It would also make TRT work harder on its own campaign and perhaps keep it from winning so handily.

Banyat is said to be undecided about the shadow-cabinet idea. His lack of strategic thinking, particularly at a time when the media are working against opposition parties, adds to the Democrat’s difficulties.

Another factor that works against the Democrat Party is that it lacks finances. After all, donors usually do not put their money on the expected losers.

But leadership and unity do not entirely depend on personality and money. Why has there not been greater input from senior Democrats and members of the Executive Committee? These people tend to talk about weaknesses more than they do strengths, particularly of the man expected to be the next party leader, Abhisit Vejjajiva, now the deputy leader. They talk also of their expected failure to keep Thaksin from a second term, rather than what they themselves can do best in their role as the main opposition party.

History is full of the lessons about what happens under fragmented leadership. Perhaps the Democrat Party will have to sink further before it can be resurrected. That is if it can be resurrected at all.

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