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Published on December 27, 2007

Whether you like it or not, we are back to normal again. The horse-trading, the negotiation gimmicks and in-your-face, blatant lying by politicians are back in full force.

And if the People Power Party does get to form the next coalition government, we may enjoy the rare honour of having the first prime minister who, even before the election campaign began, admitted with a reasonable degree of pride that he is a genuine "nominee" - a sort of a political stand-in for somebody who shall remain unnamed but is on everybody's lips.

You have to play along to enjoy the fun of being a naive Thai voter. PPP leader Samak Sundaravej said he was ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra's nominee. But isn't Thaksin one of the 111 banned politicians?

Yes.

Wasn't he risking trouble by making that statement?

Not really: he takes pride in saying things normal people wouldn't have the guts to say.

Who then, calls the shots in the ranks of the PPP? Nobody has ever posed that question to him. Nobody has to.

But then, we should all feel more at home with the familiar kind of politics now. We are now a normal country once again. The guys making news after the polls are all veteran politicians, several of them over 70. They are old hands at the game of negotiating their way into a coalition government. They call one another's bluff. They issue threats and ridiculous denials. They don't expect you to believe what they say. They simply assume that if they won in the polls, it's a mandate for them to trample on the intelligence of the whole country.

The party leader pledged during the election campaign (and repeated in an interview with CNN on election day) that if elected, the PPP would move to grant amnesty to the 111 former executives of the dissolved Thai Rak Thai Party, and that the various agencies set up to investigate corruption charges against the former premier, his family and cronies would be dismantled.

Two days after the poll - as the biggest party was trying to woo some nervous smaller parties to join in a coalition - the party's secretary-general declared that these two issues weren't on the party's urgent agenda.

A few hours later, a senior PPP executive insisted, with a straight face, that there was no truth in the alleged promises at all. Big promises must self-destruct once the votes have been delivered.

Truth, it seems, expires when it becomes politically inconvenient.

They probably think we aren't smart enough to catch them red-handed. Perhaps, they even assume that this is the kind of politics we deserve. Otherwise, why would they have the audacity to reach out to the medium-sized and small parties who had, during the election campaign, publicly denounced any political outfit associated one way or another with ex-premier Thaksin?

That was then. This is now. Besides, who remembers what any election candidates said in a campaign, after all? In fact, if you remind a politician of the things he had said to please voters, you could stand accused of promoting divisiveness at the same time as the whole country is clamouring for national reconciliation.

Don't be surprised, therefore, if you are told by them that going back on an election promise is, in fact, a big sacrifice for a full-blooded politician. For a political party to make a shameless U-turn to join a coalition government led by the PPP could well be a heartbreaking admission. One of the key negotiators from the Chart Thai Party described the hush-hush horse-trading talks as "the mother of all government-forming negotiations".

No, don't get them wrong. They aren't demanding compensation. They don't expect sympathy from a cynical public, of course. But they do hope we all have short memories. Amnesia has always been a highly valued trait among politicians, after all.

From now on, employing selective political memory is perhaps what will be the biggest challenge for we democracy-loving citizens.

Suthichai Yoon