The strains inside the Thai Rak Thai Party are beginning to show. The Democrats seem to have woken up. An ABAC poll based on a big national sample shows the Thai Rak Thai still in the lead but by much less than in the last two elections and with a large slab of the electorate currently noncommittal. So the question becomes: what chance do the Democrats have of making a dent in the Thai Rak Thai Party's electoral dominance?

The Democrats were the most successful party of the 1990s. They headed the ruling coalition for almost six of the eight-plus years between the fall of the NPKC junta in 1992, and the electoral triumph of the Thai Rak Thai in 2001. However, each time that the Democrats came to power in the 1990s, there was an element of accident or special circumstances.

In 1992, the party profited from the revulsion against the crude and corrupt generals of the NPKC junta. The Democrats were labelled as "angels" in contrast to the junta "devils", even though they had contributed almost nothing to bringing the junta down.

The popular movement against the junta had stirred up hopes for wide-ranging reforms, and the Democrats fielded a team with many new, young, well-educated politicians who promised to fulfil those hopes.

In 1997, the party profited from the collapse of the hopelessly incompetent Chavalit Yongchaiyudh government at the outset of the Asian financial crisis. People wanted a better-qualified government to handle the crisis, and the Democrats offered a team of academics, bankers, and other experts who looked as if they knew what they were doing.

In 1992, the Democrats' performance at the polls was only modest - they won 79 of the total 360 seats. In 1997, they returned to power without an electoral victory at all. The Chavalit government collapsed, and a new coalition was engineered in the corridors of power.

In both 1992 and 1997, the Democrats were swept into power by hopes for reform. On both occasions, they utterly failed to satisfy those hopes and were turfed out of power three years later by many disappointed supporters.

After the experience of the 1991-1992 NPKC junta, people expected reforms to put Thailand's long era of military rule firmly in the past - a major overhaul of the Constitution, liberalisation of the media, a start on decentralisation, and the destruction of economic monopolies. The Democrats blew all of these. Charter reforms were whittled back to some minor amendments. Proposals to overhaul the powerful Interior Ministry were crushed. Media reform never got off the ground.

After 1997, the Democrats' economic team disappointed their supporters by being far too obedient to the International Monetary Fund. In Malaysia and Korea, the governments were more defiant and the recovery seemed quicker. The Thai businessmen who had cheered the Democrats' return in 1997 were soon accusing the government of abandoning its duty to protect local interests and instead positively favouring foreign capital.

But perhaps the main failure of the Democrats in the 1990s was their inability to understand the major political change of the decade - the growth of popular protest politics, especially in the countryside. Chuan Leekpai's first government showed no remorse when the police beat up those protesting the Pak Mun dam. Chuan's second government refused to follow the cabinets of Banharn Silapa-archa and Chavalit in negotiating with the Assembly of the Poor, and once again protesters were dispersed by police or vigilantes.

The Democrats might defend themselves by pleading that their governments were coalitions which lacked the power to achieve reforms, and that the 1997 crisis was simply too overwhelming. But by the end of the 1990s, the Democrats were not credible as a party of reform, not reliable as promoters of national business interests, and not acceptable by the new popular politics.

In the three elections since 2001, support for the Democrats has been confined to three areas: the (mainly) inner wards of the capital; the provinces running up the western fringe; and, especially, the South.

More than ever before in its history, the Democrats have become a regional party. As a recent study by Mark Askew has shown, southerners (of the peninsula, not the Muslim far South) identify emotionally with the party, especially with the image of Chuan as an ideal southerner. But this firm base is both a blessing and a curse. The southerners' strong identification with the party is in part a reaffirmation of the region's uniqueness from the rest of the country. And of course, this works both ways. The rest of the country also identifies the Democrats with the South and feels the party is not for them.

In sum, the Democrats have got a lot to overcome in their past and their present. But they have been presented with an enormous opportunity by the events of the past year. What can they do to break the bounds of their history and geography? They need to play the electoral geography cleverly. The distribution of no-votes and spoiled ballots at the April poll gives some indication of where the Thai Rak Thai is most vulnerable. They need to target the western fringe, the outer wards of Bangkok, the provinces ringing the capital, the main urban centres, and the bottom-right corner of the Northeast.

The party also needs to distance itself from the failures of the 1990s, and somehow become credible as a party for reform, for business, and for the poor. Despite all the attention now paid to policy platforms, probably this is not simply a matter of having a good programme.

More likely, what is needed is to have the right people - some new faces that would send a signal to the activists, the rural leaders and the businessmen.

Chang Noi