[The reality is more complicated — the protesters
include rich and poor, Bangkok residents and many people from southern Thailand
who feel disenfranchised by the current government and its northern power base.
What unites the protesters is the desire to dismantle Ms. Yingluck’s Pheu Thai
Party, which has won every election since 2001.]
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Adam Ferguson for The New York Times
At Bangkok’s Democracy Monument, the center of antidemocracy fervor, a poster of
King Bhumibol Adulyadej was shown at a ceremony on the king’s birthday.
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From their stage beneath the Democracy Monument,
a Bangkok landmark, protesters cheer their campaign to replace Parliament with
a “people’s council” in which members are selected from various professions
rather than elected by voters.
The embattled prime minister, Yingluck
Shinawatra, has proposed new elections as a solution to the turmoil. But that
is just what the protesters do not want.
“I am one of the people who will not allow this
election to take place,” Suthep Thaugsuban, the main protest leader, told a
group of business executives in Bangkok on Thursday. Continued protests “might
hurt businesses,” he said, “but just in the short term.”
In today’s fractured Thailand, a majority wants
more democracy, but a minority, including many rich and powerful people, is
petrified by the thought of it.
Because a number of the protest leaders are
members of Thailand’s wealthiest families, some have described the
demonstrations here as the antithesis of the Occupy Wall Street movement. This
is the 1 percent rebelling against the 99 percent, they say.
The reality is more complicated — the protesters
include rich and poor, Bangkok residents and many people from southern Thailand
who feel disenfranchised by the current government and its northern power base.
What unites the protesters is the desire to dismantle Ms. Yingluck’s Pheu Thai
Party, which has won every election since 2001.
That Thailand is being convulsed by an
antidemocracy movement is somewhat surprising. The country was one of the
earliest in Asia to adopt democracy, and both women and men were allowed to
vote in local elections in 1897, more than two decades before the 19th Amendment in
the United States banned voting rights discrimination on the basis of sex.
The antidemocracy protests, which have been some
of the largest in Thai history, call into question the commonly held belief
that a rising tide of wealth in a society will naturally be followed by greater
demands for democracy. Thailand today is much richer than it was two decades
ago, but it is also much more divided.
To outsiders, and many Thais, some of the
protesters’ rhetoric seems to come from a different era.
“I can’t believe we are now arguing about
suffrage. Is this 2013 or 1913?” wrote a Thai Twitter user who goes by the
handle Kaewmala.
The antidemocratic ideas put forward by protest
leaders are a jarring contrast with the image of Thailand as a cosmopolitan
country open to the world.
At the Democracy Monument, in Bangkok’s historic
district, tens of thousands of protesters gather nightly to speak of their
skepticism of the notion of one person, one vote. A block over on Khao San
Road, a street legendary with generations of Western travelers, backpackers
watch English Premier League soccer, drink beer and enjoy $7 foot massages.
On the face of it, the crux of the protest
appears to be a classic power struggle between a dominant majority and a
minority frustrated by its losing streak in elections and its inability to
influence national policies in a winner-takes-all, highly centralized system.
But Thailand’s crisis is multifaceted and
tightly intertwined with the fact that King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the country’s
86-year-old monarch, who during more than six decades on the throne has been
revered to the point of quasi-religious devotion, is ailing and that the
country is bracing for his death.
A crucial component of protesters’ grievances is
a feeling that the king and the monarchy have been undermined and threatened by
the popularity of Ms. Yingluck’s elder brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, the former
prime minister and patriarch of the Shinawatra clan, Thailand’s most powerful
political family.
“This is a war between Thaksin and the king,”
said a 64-year-old corn farmer from central Thailand who gave her name only as
Muai and was among the thousands of protesters in the streets on Thursday.
“Thaksin has been insulting the king for far too long.”
Mr. Thaksin has never publicly spoken ill of the
king, but many of his supporters have been convicted by the authorities for
lèse-majesté, a law that has been aggressively used in recent years to clamp
down on dissent toward the monarchy.
Mr. Thaksin was removed in a 2006 military coup,
an event that helped give him the aura of a martyr and allowed his supporters
to overlook the controversial aspects of his rule, including numerous
allegations of large-scale corruption and a war against drugs that left more
than 2,800 people dead within three months.
Verapat Pariyawong, a Harvard-trained lawyer and
commentator, says the powerful bureaucracy and courtiers around the king fear
that new elites, symbolized by the rise of Mr. Thaksin, will replace them.
The Crown Property Bureau is by far the largest
landowner in Bangkok and has controlling stakes in some of the biggest
companies in the country. The managers of this fortune are among those “acting
behind the scenes,” Mr. Verapat said.
More broadly, Somsak Jeamteerasakul, a leading
Thai scholar on the monarchy, argues that Thailand’s protracted political
turmoil has been exacerbated by the contrast between a deified king and
politicians who appear crass and venal in contrast. “We have an image of
monarchy that is flawlessly excellent in everything,” he said in 2010. “If we
had not built this image in the first place, we would not have so many problems
and complaints with politicians.”
Respect for the king, and the notion of his
near-infallibility and beneficence, are deeply ingrained in Thais from the
earliest years of schooling.
Some speakers at the protests in recent days
have labeled the abandonment of the absolute monarchy in 1932 a mistake;
protest leaders have called for the king to appoint a prime minister.
Anuchyd Sapanphong, a Thai soap opera star,
recently posted on his Facebook page that he disliked corrupt politicians so
much he wished he had been born during the time of the absolute monarchy.
“I don’t think we are suited for democracy right
now,” he said on his page. “We don’t understand it that well — including me.”
