The military's top brass will continue to pull the strings from behind the political stage for at least two or three years after they step down from official posts later this year, observers said yesterday.

Veteran political scientist Chai-anan Samudvanija told a seminar on Thailand's future path held by Chulalongkorn University's Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration that democratic development would slow during such a period, but technocrats and bureaucrats would become much more politically powerful.

Anek Laothamatas, a former leader of the Mahachon Party, said the military would be the predominant factor in politics for quite some time after the Council of National Security, which staged the September 19 coup, wound itself down.

"The military's top brass will develop a new kind of relationship with political parties and politicians. They will be the key factor, even though their role will be informal.

"All politicians will revive connections with the men in green. Parties will have to pay attention to what the top brass think or say. They won't be entirely separate entities anymore.

"Our democracy will be half-baked [once again], but we hope we'll gradually achieve enough reforms to get full-fledged democracy," Anek said.

Chai-anan said it was unlikely we would see any democratic reform during the Surayud government's term.

Political parties will have no choice but to adapt to the post-coup environment, he said, adding that government measures based on the sufficiency-economy concept would also replace populist policies over the next two or three years.

Anek said the Kingdom would have to find a new balance of the universal values of democracy in a Thai context.

What he called "reconciliatory" politics would also become another challenge.

"In this sense, we need to reconcile the inevitable forces of globalisation with the royal initiatives on the sufficiency economy, or we need to reconcile populist policies [which many poor and rural Thais remain fond of] with what I call the progressive welfare movement.

"Reconciliation is indispensable, because some of these goals are more or less conflicting. One of the most obvious sets of conflicting goals is that we aspire to have a full-fledged democracy, and yet the patronage system still prevails in our society," he said.

Supavud Saicheua of Phatra Securities, a major stock brokerage, said foreign investors were now looking forward to the general election here.

Political risks should peak next quarter, when the dissolving of any political parties for election violations would be decided by the Constitution Tribunal, he said.

Foreign investors must soon factor in whatever the Thai military's top brass were thinking or would do, he added.

Nophakhun Limsamarnphun

The Nation