Thaksin must win the upcoming general election

Published on December 12, 2004

The Election Commission has set February 6 as the date for the general election, when voters will decide who should have the power to rule for the next four years. There seems to be little doubt as to who will win. The big question is how many seats Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s Thai Rak Thai Party will eventually have in the House.

After that, the next question is how long the prime minister will last in the face of the wide range of political, economic and social challenges – all of them springing from Thaksin’s zero-sum political game – that are expected to rear their ugly Hydra heads in the next several years.

Thaksin needs to win at all costs because he stands to lose a lot if his party fails to take a simple majority in the House. During his election campaign, in addition to the lip service and promises of bread in the skies for the poor and the gullible, he has also poured contempt on the Chat Thai Party, a submissive and subservient coalition partner.

Chat Thai leader Banharn Silapa-archa has had to swallow blood and try hard to hide his anger and bitterness. But beyond the pain of being at the receiving end of all things done and undone is the desire to be in the government, which overrides all other considerations, including good sense, political dignity and the requirement by the Constitution to serve the public.

Thaksin must win. A loss would be a gift to his adversaries, who would be more than happy to settle their scores. All the misdeeds and mischief-making would be exposed and could lead to an unpleasant end. What’s more, the multi-billion baht business empire of the prime minister’s family and those of his cronies would also become objects of public probity.

A win in February will mean that Thaksin can continue to prevent the negative results of the policies and projects of his first term from emerging and becoming self-evident. A win will mean he can continue to deny that what has been said and what has been carried out were actually for self-serving interests rather than for the public benefit.

A victory will mean a chance to guide the national economy away from the ill effects of the government’s misconceived populist policies and programmes. There is an urgent need to prevent disillusionment from settling in among the gullible and the debt-ridden grassroots, who might be tempted to show their discontent and outrage over having been fed spin, half-truths, tall tales and true lies during the past four years.

Thaksin’s promises of a good life for all people and an end to poverty will be haunting him to produce quick results before the poor and the gullible realise that they have been taken for a free ride.

If that happens they might come to realise that those in power have been amassing wealth beyond the ability of most people to understand.

The greed might surprise them.

Four more years of Thaksin would allow him to further consolidate his power and prepare for a smooth transfer if he keeps his word that he will be around for another term. By that time, if things are bearable, there will be manipulation campaigns and calls for him to lead the country.

What is certain is that those standing in his way will find their lives increasingly miserable, if they don’t become second-class citizens outright.

But economic problems, which are very likely to spring up due to external factors and misguided policies, will create internal social difficulties. If he foresees that a disaster is coming, he will probably be more than pleased to leave and let somebody else take on the burden of saving the nation.

Debt problems will be for the grassroots and rural poor because the upper layers of society learned a costly lesson seven years ago. The poor have seen their lives change a lot in the past four years. They were unable to have access to loans before Thaksin came in with his populist programmes. Now they are still poor, but with debts and no means repay them. They will eventually have to face their own painful lesson. Social havoc is not unthinkable.

Economists expect further growth of GDP because that is what Thaksin wants to hear – and people to believe. Nobody has bothered to predict the extent of the impact of indebtedness in the rural sector or the social ills that will come with it. The national structure – political, economic, social and moral – has been corroded by the government’s greed-driven policies.

People in the lower and middle income groups and in the grass roots have been saddled with more debts in the past four years. Thaksin’s promise of an end to poverty will become reality only through the work of a miracle – that is, if the economy adapts by showing the instinct for survival and the desire to achieve goals at all costs that characterise the prime minister himself.

SOPON ONKGARA

Post your comment to this story here