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On the surface, it seems Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has covered the bumpiest parts of the road. Apparently nothing lying ahead can be worse than the Songkran events that could easily have doomed his government and political future, let alone put his life at stake. Now protesters have left the streets, and his enemies have been weakened, allowing Abhisit to look a bit further beyond when to keep troops in the barracks and when to send them out.

With that comes a new challenge. He has survived a crisis, probably through a combination of leadership and luck, and will now have to seize the little opportunity presented by the semblance of a political cease-fire. Just when he had almost given up on his own agenda of reconciling the nation, Abhisit is able to give it another look, if not another try yet. His renewed pledge to end the national divide may have been greeted with even more scepticism than when he was sworn in, but Abhisit has been given a first-hand warning of how bad things can get if the animosity between people wearing different colours continues to fester.

On Thursday, Abhisit said he needed six to eight months to steer the country out of the turmoil. Sceptics may say Thailand's situation was worse in Abhisit's fourth month than when he took office, and therefore things are unlikely to return to "normal" in October or December. And while threats of outright street violence have considerably subsided, the nation's political intrigues have become more intense.

Thaksin Shinawatra and his men have gone completely underground, with thinly veiled threats to resort to violence to weaken the Bangkok government. But they may not be Abhisit's biggest concern. Thailand's political trouble has created a vacuum big enough to give anyone with ambition realistic hope of taking control. The emergence of the so-called blue-shirt movement, a strange, shadowy alliance of notorious and powerful political and military figures, may have alerted Abhisit to the danger of allowing real politics to be played too far outside the mainstream.

Whether or how much this has influenced his apparent leaning toward granting amnesty to banned politicians remains to be seen. However, Abhisit has already irked some of his supporters and puzzled his enemies by suggesting that such a pardon is a realistic option in the reconciliation scheme. Critics have closed in on him at the first hint of an amnesty, and rumblings of strong disapproval have come even from his own Democrat Party.

And whether or not amnesty is the most practical road towards reconciliation, Abhisit's dilemma is clear-cut: the scheme will virtually set free more than 200 politicians who are either sworn enemies of the Democrat Party or simply could form new forces capable of tilting the political balance. Advocates of amnesty will argue that those politicians are more or less the Democrats' political rivals already, so it's up to Abhisit to choose between keeping them underground or bringing them up to the surface and letting them play politics the way it should be played.

In effect, if Abhisit is serious about the amnesty, he will be torn by the possibility that it may be either a noble undertaking or one with "suicide" written all over it. Unshackling those politicians will give Parliament greater legitimacy, at least in the eyes of existing critics, but the status quo may be rattled. As a national leader, however, Abhisit carries a responsibility far greater than that of a Democrat leader. There will be debate, criticism and warnings, but in the end he will have to work out the proposed amnesty in terms of how it will affect Thailand, not his political party.

The Thaksin implications will surely be used in the argument. In fact, the Thaksin factor now features in every crucial step that determines the political course of Thailand, for better or worse. While it is hard to totally ignore the possible effects of an amnesty on the man's future, Abhisit will also have to weigh that against the effects of past political actions that took Thaksin very seriously. Abhisit may end up being either a hero or a villain, but there are varieties of those. Most heroes and villains are judged on what they do, very few on why they do it.