Cabinet ‘free’ from impeachment

Published on February 9, 2005

The Thai Rak Thai Party’s crushing election victory – which has seen it amass a staggering 17 million party-list votes in the yet-to-be-completed count – will make all future Cabinet members immune from parliamentary impeachment.

The massive party-list success will give the ruling party at least 75 MPs while the opposition Demo-crats stand to get the remaining 25 seats.

The Chat Thai Party, having garnered around 1.3 million votes, needs some 400,000 more votes to grab a share of the party-list cake – a difficult though not impossible scenario.

About 11 million more votes are still to be counted, and the bad news for Chat Thai and the Democrats is that a large portion of those votes are from the North and Northeast – both completely conquered by Thai Rak Thai in the constituency ballot.

Prime Minister Thaksin Shina-watra’s party is expected to win up to eight million more votes, leaving the Democrats and Chat Thai to fight for the rest.

Chat Thai’s failure in the party-list (proportional representation) battle as well as its poor showing in the constituency contest mean the post-election opposition will comprise 115 MPs, not enough under the Constitution to launch impeachment action against any Cabinet member.

To impeach a minister the opposition would have to rely on a tougher channel – gathering 50,000 signatures to kick-start the process.

“It would be a shame if the Chat Thai Party doesn’t get any party-list seats, because the future opposition then would not be able to carry out its full duty,” said Demo-crat spokesman Ong-art Klam-paiboon.

“We have to accept the decisions of the voters, however, although

this means we will only be able to censure Cabinet members, not impeach them.”

The Chat Thai camp was yesterday hoping for the best, but fearing the worst. The high turnout of more than 70 per cent nationwide was its main cause for optimism.

Party leader Banharn Silapa-archa was “quite concerned” about the prospects, according to party sources. But senior party members believed that gaining some hundreds of thousands more votes out of 11 million was highly likely.

Latest results showed Thai Rak Thai won 310 constituency seats. If the party-list trend does not change drastically, the ruling camp’s strength will be boosted to 385 seats. The Democrats appeared to have secured 69 constituency seats and 25 party list seats.

Unless it wins a party-list share, Chat Thai will have to settle for 20 seats. The newly-formed Mahachon Party will have only one representative in the House.

Thai Rak Thai leaders, whose poll projections have been proved accurate, warned Chat Thai not to be too optimistic about its chances.

“We have done our calculations based on real statistics and factors and we can say the previous speculation that Thai Rak Thai will win 67 party-list seats and Chat Thai eight seats is not correct,” said TRT poll director Pongpol Adireksan. “Chat Thai won’t get any seat.”

Sucheera Pinijparakarn

The Nation

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