• 
• 

Published on November 10, 2007

People Power Party leader Samak Sundaravej, a self-confessed Thaksin nominee, must be a very frustrated man, and it is not too difficult to see why. Running a political party the size of the PPP, a reincarnation of the now-defunct Thai Rak Thai Party, on behalf of deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra cannot be an easy task. Even at the height of his power, Thaksin at times found himself struggling to keep members of his huge, faction-ridden party together. With Thaksin and 110 other TRT executives barred from politics after the Constitution Court found the party guilty of electoral fraud, Samak was brought back from semi-retirement to lead the PPP.

Samak, who used to be leader of the small Prachakorn Thai Party, has been enlisted by Thaksin to salvage what is left of TRT and to make the best use of the disbanded party's hordes of loyal supporters in the North and Northeast to propel the new party to power.

It is clear for everybody to see, including all PPP members and its supporters, that Samak does not really have Thaksin's clout, which was backed by his fabulous wealth. Samak is simply a nominal head, and it is understood that Thaksin and his henchmen continue to pull strings from behind the scenes.

Everyone knows that Samak is little more than a hired gun who wields no real influence over how the PPP is run. But the PPP leader apparently doesn't want that fact to become too obvious to the public. That explains why Samak went ballistic the other day when a group of reporters put him on the spot and demanded to know if Thaksin's trusted lieutenants, Newin Chidchob and Sudarat Keyuraphan, helped him select the PPP's party-list candidates. Both Newin and Sudarat are among the 111 TRT executives barred from political activity.

Samak has always been the kind of demagogic right-wing politician whose blunt speaking, animated by a measure of crudeness, endeared him to certain voters. But the kind of vulgarity that he resorted to in front of a group of reporters revealed the source of his anger and frustration. The PPP leader's standing as a front-runner for the job of the prime minister has been diminished and, with it, the credibility of the party that he leads.

After all, the reporters were only doing their jobs, asking legitimate questions, trying to get Samak to confirm or deny the widely circulated rumours about Newin and Sudarat's involvement in the running of the PPP.

Samak's inability to deal with journalists on a professional level also gives the lie tohis claim as a politician that he respects democracy. Journalists are only exercising the right to know when they ask how the PPP makes decisions about its party-list candidates.

The public right to know, along with freedom of expression and other civil liberties, are the key pillars that underpin democracy. Samak's insistence that the matter was a PPP internal affair and that it was no one's business was downright unreasonable. As a political leader Samak cannot claim that what is happening within the PPP is supposed to be protected by the right to privacy. Samak is a public figure and a political party is a public institution - not a private company.

For the leader of a major political party to confuse these basic issues of the public right to know versus the right to privacy is cause for grave concern. An easier to understand explanation for this is that Samak may only have made a slip of the tongue.

Thaksin, who is Samak's political master, had run the TRT as if it was his private company, and treated party executives and MPs as if they were his employees. As a political party that claims to promote democracy, TRT had an internal structure that was based on the corruption-prone patronage system in which power was concentrated in the hands of Thaksin, who controlled the party's purse strings.

 Samak and the PPP will have a lot of explaining to do to prove that that is still not the case. Failing that, he and his party cannot be considered worthy of serious consideration by the public as a contender to take over Government House after the December 23 general election.

The Nation