One of the interpretations of the recent political conflict, which resulted in the red and yellow social movements, has been that this is a battle among the elite, essentially between former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his enemies, and that ordinary people are being used as paid pawns in the struggle.

This analysis argues that while this argument may not be totally wrong, it could be very misleading. The yellow and the red movements have turned out to be competitive mobilisations of supporters and ideological warfare. As such, they are completely different from the social movements of the 1990s, when groups or organisations of people got together to stage protests or sit-ins in order to air their grievances and bargain with government to advance their interests, mostly in cooperation with various NGOs. The results of these negotiations were not always successful, but one of the positive outcomes of these early social movements was the opening up of the political space for ordinary people within the framework of the parliamentary system.

The changed character of the present social movements, as exemplified by the red and yellow movements, reflects a major political shift which happened between 1997 and 2005, when the aggrieved began to seek redress through the electoral process rather than protest. So, in this talk we will focus on understanding why electoral politics became more important, and what implications the yellow and red social movements have for Thai politics. In so doing we have to look at the career of Thaksin, who broke the mould of Thai politics by making a direct deal with the voters.

 Elite Conflict, Mass Mobilisations, Ideological Warfare

The key to understanding the present crisis is the fact that, in Thailand’s modern political history, there has been no decisive break or disjuncture involving mass mobilisation. There was no nationalist movement against colonial rule, no war defeat discrediting the elite. The revolution against absolute monarchy in 1932 enjoyed wide support but required no mass mobilisation. The communist insurgency of the 1960s and 1970s was located deep in the forests and hills and never swelled into a mass uprising. Peasant movements and labour agitation have been localised.

The modern Thai political system is best viewed as an oligarchy which has never been radically threatened from below. This oligarchy has constantly evolved, incorporating new groups and power centres, and building internal bonds through networks, patronage ties and deals. Under absolute monarchy, a bureaucratic elite developed in the early 20^th century, and has since been entrenched. From the 1930s to the 1980s, a military elite became absolutely dominant. As the urban economy grew in the post-war era of development, new business groups were accommodated. As prosperity spread upcountry, and better communications tied the provincial areas more tightly to the capital, a provincial business elite was also incorporated. More recently, the senior judiciary and parts of civil society have also been included.

Although noble families and old money figure strongly in this oligarchy, this has never been a closed elite. Indeed its resilience has come partly from its openness and flexibility.

Until recently, the advent of parliament and electoral politics resulted in no major challenge. People invested heavily to ensure that money was critical to electoral success, excluding all those who did not have enough. In the 1990s, around 70% of MPs were drawn from the ranks of male business owners who make up less than 3% of the population. Parliament was a highly unrepresentative rich men’s club, and one of the key institutions of oligarchic networking.

The financial crisis of 1997 created the conditions for a challenge to this oligarchic structure. Thailand had not experienced a shrinkage of the economy since GDP figures were first collected, and the savage downturn of almost 20% undermined the prestige and credibility of those in power. Against this background, a series of political reforms were pushed through, including a new constitution and decentralisation. And the economic distress intensified the upsurge of pressure from below.

The full consequences of these developments, however, took time to emerge.

Thaksin Shinawatra positioned himself at the head of a challenge to the old system. But initially he challenged only the excessive power of the central bureaucracy and the old political guard of the Democrat Party, which he pictured as bureaucratic in style. Thaksin promised to rescue the economy from the crisis and take Thailand into the ranks of First World countries by shouldering aside the bureaucracy and running the country like a corporation.

At the start he was enthusiastically supported by the business community and most of the middle class. But a challenge to one part of the oligarchy gradually came to be seen as a threat to all of it. The bureaucrats resented and resisted Thaksin’s efforts at reform. Because history showed that reformers in Thailand risked being ejected by a coup, Thaksin tried to exert control over the military, but his efforts were clumsy, and he ended up antagonising powerful factions within the military elite.

Business initially cheered Thaksin’s efforts, but then turned sour when it became obvious that most of the benefits accrued to a small coterie of families clustered around Thaksin, and especially Thaksin’s own family businesses.

This was shaping up as a classic inter-elite battle, of which there are many examples in Thailand’s recent past. But the scene was totally changed by the new element in the political context _ the upsurge of a demand from below for better access to power, better treatment and more public goods.

Thaksin flirted with this new force from 2000 when his political organisers, recruited from among old student radicals, crafted an electoral platform that included a universal health scheme, agrarian debt relief and micro-finance. As the first signs of elite opposition to his project emerged, he implemented this programme rapidly, and was rewarded with an upsurge in popularity. He responded with more programmes, including a promise to end poverty, and generous agricultural subsidies.

Then in 2004-5, as opposition from the oligarchy and many of his early supporters swelled, he went much farther _ presenting himself as a classic populist who drew his authority directly from the popular vote, who was dedicated to working “for the people” and who was openly disdainful of the old guard including bureaucrats, bankers, academics, newspaper editors and judges.

Thaksin had shown no sign of such radicalism in his early career. He had been changed from below, by the upsurge of demand for a better deal. In 2005, he won a landslide victory at the polls, and promised his supporters he would rule for a quarter-century, rather in the model of Mahathir Mohamad and Lee Kuan Yew.

The old oligarchy now closed ranks against Thaksin. But something else happened which broadened this beyond a narrow elite struggle. Much of the Bangkok middle class, which had earlier been generally supportive of Thaksin’s project, reacted fearfully against his lurch towards populism. Conscious of their minority status in the electorate, and of their privileged position, they felt especially vulnerable to Thaksin’s new populist crusade. The yellow-shirt movement was launched in 2005 as an explicit campaign to defend the interests of the middle class.

To bind together the opponents to Thaksin and raise the emotional temperature, the yellow shirt leaders alleged that Thaksin was a threat to the monarchy. In fact, Thaksin had been careful not to attack the monarchy, or be seen as a threat. But the yellow shirts made up a story about Thaksin plotting the overthrow of the monarchy during an excursion to Finland. They dressed themselves in T-shirts announcing they were the monarchy’s defenders.

In Thailand’s old politics of oligarchy, the classic strategy at such times of conflict was a military coup. And indeed, that was what occurred on Sept 19, 2006. But the old politics no longer prevailed, so the coup did not really work. The army was out of practice at this manœuvre, and the post-coup government was a disaster, quickly losing all popularity. Because Thailand with its globalised economy needed to be politically acceptable in the world, Parliament had to be restored quickly. Despite a massive attempt to rig the election using public funds and public servants, the pro-Thaksin forces won another victory, and could not be prevented from forming the government.

The attack on Thaksin and his populism now became a wider and deeper attack on electoral democracy. The post-coup government made a start with a new constitution which undid many of the gains of the 1990s reforms, diminished the power of Parliament and elevated the military and judiciary. The yellow shirts now became a military-godfathered mob that harassed ministers and besieged Parliament. The judiciary handed down a series of judgements that overthrew two governments, sacked several individual ministers, disbanded three political parties, and banned 220 MPs from politics for five years.

In parallel, the yellow shirts developed an ideological justification for this attack. They argued that most politicians were corrupt, and that elections were won with money, and hence the results held no legitimacy. They proposed moving away from one man-one vote by bringing back appointed MPs, basing representation on occupational groups, or transferring power away to the monarchy, bureaucracy and judiciary.

The movement using red as their symbol, which later became known as the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD), first emerged as counter to the coup of 2006, and to the yellow shirts. Its core was among the supporters of Thaksin, largely in the far North, Northeast and the migrant population of the capital. The movement has since also gathered support from many in the intelligentsia and middle class who have no love for Thaksin but who believe democracy is under threat. An element of their supporters is drawn from a new generation of young “netizens” who learn by chatting on the internet, in particular the rachadamnoen chat room at the website panthip.com, groups like the student red shirts and the FARED (First Aid Red Shirts). They are not fighting for Thaksin, but want genuine democracy. Some of the supporters hold socialist or republican ideas, but probably these are the minority.

According to an analyst: “Perhaps they [the reds] are the first real ’mass’ movement that Thailand has ever produced. The prolonged protests and demonstrations of the red shirts have exceeded all expectations and defied all the expressions of contempt against them by the Thai urban elite.”

The red shirt movement is an attack on the power structure, and not an attack on business, or on the capitalist system. Although the support is largely class-based, it has no enemy class that it wants to tear down.

The movement is structured through media channels, with local groups clustered around community radio stations, and national communication achieved through a satellite TV channel. From late 2009, the leaders conducted political schools. Local groups regularly ran fund-raisers and campaign meetings.

From mid-2008, red and yellow groups have occasionally clashed. In a moment of terrible clarity, yellow shirts claiming to be defenders of the monarchy clashed with red shirts claiming to be defenders of democracy.

At the end of 2008, the pro-Thaksin government installed by the 2007 election was forced out of power by military pressure, judicial rulings and a parliamentary manœuvre. Since then, the main demand of the red shirt movement has been for an election to reinstate the popular mandate. They also want to change the constitution, perhaps back to the 1997 version. In their rhetoric, they call themselves phrai, an old word for serf in Thailand’s version of a feudal system; describe their enemies as amatya, an old word for a senior noble or official; and rail against “double standards”. In this vocabulary, they clearly show the resentment against the inequities of wealth, power, and opportunity.

Since December 2008, the Democrat Party has headed a coalition government. The party has a royalist heritage and for the last two decades has positioned itself as the party of the urban middle class. The government relies heavily on military support. The prime minister has been living inside an army camp for much of this year. In April 2009 and again in May 2010, large military operations dispersed protests demanding a new election. The government is engaged in suppression of the media on a scale not seen since the military era, with pro-red papers closed, radio stations threatened, the red TV occasionally disrupted, thousands of websites blocked, and an unprecedented number of cases under the lese majeste law.

So, to sum up, there is an elite conflict in progress, but there is also a widening of the political nation which is challenging the political structure.

Thaksin and his coterie set out to displace the bureaucracy and the old political establishment, represented especially by the Democrat Party. At the beginning, this was an elite conflict, and it is still in progress. The Democrats now hold power, and are desperate to prevent Thaksin from returning.

But the conflict then flowed beyond the elite. Thaksin, despite everything in his background, became the instrument of a demand, bubbling up from below, for a fairer society. Thaksin was transformed by this force into a kind of politician common in most countries, but very new in Thailand _ a stump populist who claims the direct support of the people. He thus became a trigger for the mass of people to find meaning in the vote as a means to better themselves.

Thaksin’s lurch to populism, combined with his extraordinary wealth, then made many in the middle class feel insecure. They looked to the old institutions, the military and the monarchy, to make up for their weakness in numbers. Many were mobilised to join the yellow shirt movement of sustained street protests. The conflict within the elite had thus broadened into two antagonistic mass mobilisations.

These two movements have then sparked a fierce ideological debate over how Thailand’s democracy should develop. The red side wants to restore the electoral system to something like the 1997 constitution as a precondition for reducing the “double standards” which of course means the entrenched power of the old oligarchy.

In response, the yellow side argues that a democracy without checks and balances will be dangerous and unstable. They want a stronger framework of law, and a higher sense of morality, to restrain the patent corruption and rent-seeking by politicians.

The elite conflict and the social movement are joined through the person of Thaksin. This adds complication because he is a paradoxical figure _ a modernist and business advocate who became a populist; a man with contempt for democracy who became its defendant; a corrupt moneybags who profited from the “double standards” and then railed against them.

But history is strewn with such complications.

 In Perspective

The turmoil in Bangkok earlier this year needs to be placed in some perspective. It was dramatic, but not so very different from events in many other cities. During the same months, there were riots in Greece, battles with the police in Turkey, an occupation of the capital by the dispossessed in Egypt, Maoist demonstrations in Nepal, and a riot in the capital of Kyrgyzstan that physically drove the president out of his house and job. Many of these outbreaks, like those in Thailand, were revolts of the dispossessed against an old political establishment.

The widening of the political nation, and challenge to old oligarchy, are processes which most countries experience, especially as they become more prosperous. Thailand’s transition is especially turbulent because, for certain historical reasons, it has come rather late and faces fierce opposition, strengthened by old institutions.

Over the past year, a handful of reliable surveys have asked a representative sample of the Thai population about political matters. The overwhelming majority state that they have faith in electoral democracy, are happy with constitutional monarchy, have no problem with peaceful demonstrations, and would like the army and privy councillors to keep out of politics.

At the same time, the most recent of these surveys shows that both red and yellow have significant bases of support. The challenge lies in getting these movements off the streets and into representative institutions so that their clashing views on reform can be debated with words and ideas, not crude weaponry.

Pasuk Phongpaichit & Chris Baker

---