Thai generals seek to entrench 'father-knows-best' government

Δημοσιεύθηκε: 23 Απριλίου 2015 - 04:56

Politicians' stock is pretty low in many parts of the world, but spare a thought for prospective members of Thailand's parliament.

Under a draft constitution now under consideration by the country's military rulers, a new National Moral Assembly could bar them from office if they were held to be of bad character. Those who make it into parliament would work under licence: they would be banned from passing laws that "establish political popularity" but that could prove "detrimental to national economic [interests] or the public in the long run".

These and other curbs on the power of elected representatives proposed in this 315-article blueprint for the future of the southeast Asian country may sound absurd.

But there is nothing comical about this attempt by the military junta and its allies to entrench what one commentator brands "father-knows-best" government. It is part of an expanding effort by the generals and their placemen and women to reshape the country they seized in a coup in May last year - whatever the social, political and economic costs.

The leaked document now being circulated is a product of the Constitutional Drafting Committee, one of many bodies used by the junta to make its vision of Thailand reality. The draft has gone in the past week to the generals' handpicked National Reform Council. It may or may not be put to a referendum. Either way, the generals appear determined to enshrine it, or something close to it, in law.

While the proposals have prompted measured criticisms from politicians on all sides and from some analysts, the junta's crackdown on protest and free expression has stifled opposition and debate.

The draft proposes sweeping measures to entrench and enhance the powers of bureaucrats, the military and political appointees, at the expense of the big political parties. The senate, fully elected a decade ago, would reserve only 77 of 200 seats to voters - and even these would be filled only by vetted candidates. The prime minister would no longer need to be an elected politician, while courts that have already trampled on voters' wishes over the past seven years by sacking three premiers and twice outlawing the most popular political party would enjoy still greater sway.

Defenders of the new arrangements say they are essential to stopping the conflict and corruption that have plagued the country for a decade and placed an economic drag on this former regional dynamo.

Thailand's old urban political establishment has been at war with Thaksin Shinawatra, a plutocrat turned prime minister whose parties have won every election since 2001 on the back of support from millions of rural voters. The new constitution will help end "conflicts, disunity and undemocratic fights", General Lertrat Ratanavanich, a spokesman for the constitution drafting committee, has insisted.

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>But the junta has had much less to say about who will guard its self-appointed guardians. While few non-partisan voices dispute that graft flourished under Thaksin-allied governments, the pro-junta traditional elite has had plenty of historic scandals of its own. The military itself remains a black box, never held accountable for mass killings of protesters or for procurement fiascos, such as the millions of dollars paid to a British conman for fake bomb detectors.

There is no sign yet of the generals in Bangkok facing organised open resistance or losing their grip on security. But, much as some more authoritarian figures in Thailand's establishment might wish it, their country is not China - people have grown used to elections in which their votes count. Some past Thai military rulers proved to have a sell-by date, triggering street demonstrations when people felt they had become draconian or too domineering.

The latest junta's moralising style has a certain traction in a country where people have grown sick of corruption and where, for good and ill, longstanding hierarchies and institutions still hold significant sway. But such an approach also has obvious limits in a modern and open state, especially if the moralisers are shown not to be living up to their own homilies. The question now worrying moderates and democrats on all sides is: are the 2015 vintage of generals about to test their pet theories of social order to destruction?

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