Abstract
Thailand fits the pattern of pernicious polarized politics identified in this volume, where a previously excluded group successfully gains political power through the ballot box, governs unilaterally to pursue radical reforms, and produces a backlash from the traditional power elites. In Thailand, elite conflict has been a major part of the story, but this article argues that political polarization there cannot be merely understood as “elite-driven”: conflict among the elites and the masses, and the interaction between them, produced polarized and unstable politics. Violent struggle is caused by class structure and regional, urban-rural disparities; elite struggle activates the existing social cleavages; and ideological framing deepens the polarization. While the Yellow Shirts and traditional elites want to restore and uphold the “Thai-style democracy” with royal nationalism, the Red Shirts espouse the “populist democracy” of strong elected government with popular nationalism and egalitarian social order.
Since the mid-2000s, international media have regularly portrayed Thailand as a country engulfed by tumultuous street violence and a deep divide between two opposing political mass movements, called the Yellow Shirts and Red Shirts, whose differences of ideology and interests were signified symbolically by color codes. According to McCoy and Rahman’s (2016) dynamic model of polarization, Thailand perfectly fit the causal pattern of pernicious polarized politics, in which “a previously excluded or marginalized sector of the population successfully gained political power through the ballot box, governed unilaterally to achieve the deep reforms they espouse, and produces a backlash from the previous power elites. The resulting conflict may end in a) gridlock and/or instability, with alternating governments failing to achieve governability; b) removal of the new group from power; or c) increasing authoritarian behavior by the incumbent to stay in power.” (p. 2).
Dynamics of Polarization in Thailand: Divided Polity and Zero-Sum Politics
Political polarization in Thailand is a recent phenomenon. It emerged in 2005 with protests against the government of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra that gradually became the mass movement known as the Yellow Shirts. Polarization deepened when the triple alliance of royal-military-bureaucratic elites, supported by Yellow Shirt protesters comprised mainly of urban middle- and upper-classes, as well as big business groups, decided to overthrow the popularly elected Thaksin government by staging a military coup in 2006. The coup led to the formation of a pro-Thaksin mass movement (generally known as the Red Shirts), which mobilized to confront the traditional elites and the Yellow Shirts. The Red Shirt movement gained support from rural people, urban poor, Thaksin’s party constituency, and progressive activists, as well as local and national politicians connected to Thaksin. The confrontation and clashes between the two opposing movements, and between state security units and the demonstrators, led to a large number of deaths and injuries, a paralyzed government, political instability, military intervention, and democratic breakdown. Over time, political polarization also spilled over into the societal sphere (including among families, friends, and communities). As polarization deepened, people were forced to choose sides, and political contestation became a deadly game.
In this article, I argue that the political polarization in Thailand should not be understood merely as an elite-driven conflict. Seeing Thailand’s ongoing polarization as an elite power struggle between Thaksin and rival royal-military elites is not completely wrong, but it does not fully appreciate the dynamics of the polarized conflict. Fierce struggles between opposing sides of the elite are driven not only by control of state power and economic interests, but also by different notions about nationhood and political legitimacy. Furthermore, socioeconomic factors are not sufficient to account for the deep polarization that has evolved over time. The ideological component needs to be taken into account, as it produces the ingroup/outgroup division, and coalesces people from various socioeconomic backgrounds into two rival political camps.
To understand polarized conflicts in Thailand, it is thus important to understand two layers of conflict—the elite and the masses. The interaction of these two layers—shaped by individual, institutional, structural, and ideological factors—has led to the pernicious polarization witnessed in Thailand since the mid-2000s.
Dynamics of Polarization: The Rise of a “Populist” Party, the Awakening Masses, and the Backlash
The backdrop to the country’s long and ongoing political crisis is the significant socioeconomic changes that have occurred in rural areas or rural/agrarian transformation since the 1980s (Walker 2012). But without the rise of Thaksin and his party, transformation would not have transpired in a way that led to deep polarization. It is therefore necessary to look at the rise of Thaksin in 2001, when his party won a landslide electoral victory and he became the prime minister.
To understand Thaksin’s rise, one needs to go back to the dramatic political and economic changes that took place in the late 1990s. These changes significantly altered the rules of the game and the power balance among political forces. The rise of a new political player like Thaksin and his Thai Rak Thai Party (TRT) was a product of the financial crisis and the newly created constitution in 1997. These produced strong incentives, as well as opportunities, for national-level capitalists like Thaksin and his peers to form a political party and capture state power.
The 1997 constitution, which was supported by a reform coalition that consisted of liberal elites, technocrats, and civil society organizations, aimed to fix the enduring problems of Thai parliamentary democracy seen since the 1980s: a fragmented party system, weak coalition governments, and unstable democracy. To reform Thai politics, the constitution created several new organizations, mechanisms, and rules. For the first time in Thailand’s history, voting became compulsory for all eligible voters, and party switching, a popular practice among Thai politicians, was restricted. The most far-reaching reform was a major overhaul of the electoral system. As part of an attempt to facilitate coherent political parties and party-oriented politics, it replaced the block-vote system with a mixed-member system. 1 Out of 500 House seats, 400 were elected from single-seat districts on a plurality basis (or first past the post); another 100 were elected from a single nationwide district on a proportional basis. All political parties had to submit a list of candidates for voters to consider, and those on the party list were ranked by top party leaders based on popularity, connection, and caliber. The aim of a party-list system was to give technocrats, businessmen, and professionals an opportunity to enter politics without electioneering. It also aimed to strengthen party building and party organization (Hicken 2006).
Thaksin and his TRT were the most skillful players in adapting themselves to the new rules and making use of the new system. The TRT introduced party-based and relatively more policy-oriented politics, a new style of electoral campaigning, and the ambitious goal of creating a single-party government. The political changes brought about by Thaksin and the TRT placed other elites in a completely new sociopolitical environment (Kongkirati 2013).
Thaksin Shinawatra (1950–), a telecommunication business tycoon turned politician, founded the TRT in 1998. He was born in Chiang Mai to a prominent business family, some of whom had successful political careers. He was a police officer until 1987, after which he became a full-time businessman, making a considerable fortune after obtaining government concessions for mobile phone and satellite networks. By the mid-1990s, he was a star in the business world and an advocate for economic and political reforms. He launched his political career in the mid-1990s (Phongpaichit and Baker 2009).
After the 1997 economic crisis and the promulgation of the new constitution, Thaksin launched the TRT, aiming to be the first prime minister elected in the postreform era. The 1997 crisis created strong incentives for prominent capitalists to directly capture state power. “Business was shocked by the severity of the economic slump, and by the refusal of the Democrat Party government (1997–2001) to assume any responsibility for defending domestic capital against its impact,” Chaiwat and Phongpaichit (2008, 255) explain. Also, “the increased globalization of business raised the potential returns from holding the office of prime minister” (Chaiwat and Phongpaichit 2008, 256). Thaksin led a group of leading capitalists, who had not been severely damaged by the crisis, in pursuing a high-risk, high-return strategy of building their own political party, rather than building clientelistic relations with leading bureaucrats or sponsoring other people’s parties like other capitalists had in the past. Thaksin’s strategy was also different from that of other political oligarchs in the pre-1997 period. Rather than trying to win a plurality of votes and sharing power with other leaders in a multiparty coalition, he sought to win an absolute majority of votes and form a single-party government. In other words, he and his party strove for monopolistic control instead of the conventional mode of sharing power. The new electoral and party system, as explained above, was designed to promote strong executive power and large political parties. This, in turn, facilitated Thaksin and the TRT’s political ambitions.
Beginning in 2001, the TRT was highly successful in every election, scoring landslide victories. To be precise, they won election contests six consecutive times (2001, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2011, and 2014) following the party’s formation. The three most crucial factors that contributed to Thaksin’s political domination were Thaksin’s personality, populist policies, and shrewd campaign methods (Kongkirati 2013; Phatharathananunth 2008). For general voters, Thaksin offered strong and decisive leadership, which they had never found among bureaucratic leaders and old-style politicians. His responsiveness to the grievances of the urban and rural lower class and lower middle class, who together constituted the majority of the electorate, gave him a loyal political base and guaranteed his electoral success. TRT’s policy package included universal health care, a village fund, debt moratorium for poor farmers, scholarships for village kids, cheap housing, and so on. This set of policies was highly popular with and admired by the poor, though pundits and critics called it “populist” (prachaniyom in Thai). During election campaigns, TRT ran a complementary two-pronged campaign strategy—a party-list centered campaign for the party-list seats and a candidate-centered campaign for constituency seats. The party was also savvy in using political marketing and the mass media to bolster its image (Kongkirati 2014; Chattharakul 2010).
Thaksin and his political party became an invincible force in electoral battle. In the 2005 election, TRT won a supermajority, securing 377 out of 500 seats. The Democrat Party, the major opposition party and one of the oldest political parties in Thailand, came in second with only 96 seats. The TRT thus became the first political party in Thai history to establish a single-party government, and Thaksin became the first elected prime minister to duly serve the full four-year term and win elections twice. 2 He had achieved monopolistic control over the Cabinet and Parliament, and his domineering power and popularity made him a real threat to the old network of elites. While the landslide 2005 election victory and single-party government brought political aggrandizement to Thaksin, it generated fear and perturbation among his opponents. Beginning in 2001, Thaksin and his party employed various tactics to undermine his critics and rival political parties’ power bases. But Thaksin had not been able to subvert extraparliamentary forces, in particular the royalist networks and the military—an alliance constituting the most formidable sources of traditional power in the Thai polity. A royal-military-bureaucratic alliance represents the old elites who dominated Thai politics from the 1950s until the late 1990s. Cold War politics, with the support of the American allies, propelled their power to its peak. The conservative elites underpinned their legitimate authority through the hegemonic discourse of Thai-style democracy guided by a benevolent monarch and patriotic military. Before Thaksin’s rise, their political domination was secure, as political parties were weak and lacked mass support, and elected governments were feeble and unstable. The immense popularity and electoral success of the TRT made Thaksin the center of a new elite network of major capitalists and politicians. Thaksin’s power network challenged the hegemony of the royal-military-bureaucratic alliance (McCargo 2005). The royal-military-bureaucratic political network did not embrace the basic democratic rules of the game, as such rules went against their traditional authority. They wanted to retain their power, privilege, and supremacy, and return the country to an old model of “semi-democracy,” in which the bureaucracy and military dominated politics under the auspices of the monarchy. This conservative force was not willing to compete in electoral politics but still controlled critical parts of the state apparatus, notably the army, the courts and some parts of the bureaucracy (Baker 2016; Eugenie 2016). Consequently, it could destabilize elected governments. Nevertheless, given Thaksin’s firm control of the government, his royal-military-bureaucratic opponents understood that the only way to unseat him was by nonelectoral, extraparliamentary means.
Soon after the 2005 election, those opposing Thaksin consisted of business rivals and personal foes, NGO activists, journalists, academics and professionals, human rights defenders, bureaucrats, and the urban middle class, all of whom joined forces against his government. By early 2006, Thaksin’s legitimacy had been eroded by his controversial business dealings, and the antigovernment movement led by media mogul Sondhi Limthongkul and Major General Chamlong Srimuang gained crucial momentum. 3 In an attempt to revitalize his legitimacy, the embattled prime minister dissolved parliament and called for a snap election in April 2006. All main opposition parties decided to boycott the election, leaving the TRT running unopposed. Political party leaders claimed that Thaksin no longer had legitimacy and the snap election was an attempt to divert public attention from his business scandal. The sudden dissolution of parliament, they argued, also left opposition parties no time to prepare for an election campaign. 4 After the release of the election results showing that the TRT had won 460 of the 500 seats, anti-Thaksin leaders declared that they did not accept the results and “would go on rallying until Thaksin resigns and Thailand gets a royally appointed prime minister.” 5 The political situation had reached an impasse.
On September 19, 2006, a group of army leaders staged a coup, the first in 15 years. The royal-military alliance could not defeat Thaksin and his political machine in an election, so Thai elites changed the game, staging a coup to eliminate Thaksin and his populist party. The 2006 coup further polarized the country, exacerbated political divisions, and radicalized political participation. The leaders changed frequently, and all prime ministers, whether from the Thaksin or anti-Thaksin camp, were faced with virulent protests. Violent street clashes and military crackdowns dominated political life. Deep polarization and hostility between the pro- and anti-Thaksin forces led Thai society to a continued cycle of violence and democratic breakdown for over a decade. Thaksin was forced to live in exile, but his allied parties have remained highly popular among marginalized voters, especially in the North and Northeast as well as among urban poor and the working class. Even though his allies kept winning elections without Thaksin, they could not govern the country, as they were continuously faced with fierce protests from the upper middle class and conservative elites, and they were undermined by the politicized independent organizations and Constitutional Court. From 2006 to 2014, Thaksin’s allied parties were dissolved twice, and three of their prime ministers were disqualified by the Constitutional Court and independent organizations (Kongkirati 2016a).
In early 2014, urban middle-class protesters and staunch supporters of the Democrat Party from the south mobilized under the banner the People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), protesting against the elected government of Yingluck Shinawatra, who is Thaksin’s sister. The PDRC employed violence to disrupt and paralyze the government. The protesters repeatedly called for military intervention to unseat the Yingluck government. The violent protests by the PDRC ultimately paved the way for political intervention by the military. On May 22, 2014, General Prayuth Chan-ocha, the army chief, staged a coup to topple the government and brought the country back under the control of royal-military elites. General Prayuth was appointed by the coup-installed assembly to act as the country’s new prime minister. Under his leadership, he recreated the old model of bureaucratic dominance and “Thai-style democracy,” where the bureaucracy and military dominate politics under the auspices of the monarchy (see Chambers and Waitoolkiat 2016; Hewison and Kitirianglarp 2010). The military-controlled government aims to weaken political parties and civil society organizations, and to “tame” the majoritarian democracy that traditional elites had previously failed to harness. Under repressive military rule, civil liberties are restricted and political activity is prohibited. Thai society remains polarized, as the coup failed to transform ideological conflicts; it merely suppressed them (Kongkirati and Kanchoochat 2018).
The Linkage between Intra-Elite Power Struggle and Mass-Based Conflict
Since the conflict started, scholars of Thai politics have debated how to understand it. The debate is divided into two camps—those who view the polarized conflict as a typical elite power struggle of a type frequently witnessed in Thailand since the 1932 revolution, and those who see it as a “revolt of the downtrodden.” 6 Those who propose that the crisis is centered on elite contestation argue that civil organizations and protesters in the streets are merely tools or pawns used by elites on both sides to win political battles. McCargo (2010), for example, describes it as “conflict between different elements of the Thai elite, who have mobilized rival patronage-based networks of supporters” (p. 9). The “elite struggle’” framework has several shortcomings, as I explain below.
By reducing supporters of both sides to pawns of the elite, this argument fails to explain the autonomous roles played by ordinary people. For one clear example, the Yingluck Shinawatra government’s decision to pass a bill giving blanket amnesty to all conflicting parties was opposed strongly by a number of Red Shirt supporters. The “elite struggle” theory also fails to explain the longevity and intensity of social division among Thai people, which goes beyond the elite’s agenda and control. Scholarship on social movements suggests that successful mass mobilization involves political opportunity, resource mobilization, organizational building, and resonated framing (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001). Thaksin and his elite rivals were the prime movers of polarized conflict, but they did not dictate the direction and dynamics of conflict. If the polarization in Thailand were elite contestation first and foremost, it would not have lasted more than a decade—either one side would have won the political fight or both sides would have struck a political deal. Thaksin’s policies and actions helped to activate the key social cleavages (regional, urban-rural, and class) that already existed in Thai society long before he came to power. Policies such as the village fund, debt moratorium, and universal health care empowered the rural lower and lower middle classes but made the urban middle and upper classes feel threatened and insecure. The royal-military network’s decision to eliminate Thaksin through unconstitutional means worsened the situation and aggravated the conflict by upsetting the lower middle class that supported Thaksin. In turn, the radicalization of Thaksin and his supporters in defense of electoral democracy deepened the fear and insecurity of the establishment–middle-class nexus, which then struck back with more aggressive measures.
Different scholars have attributed polarization in Thailand to different factors and aspects of cleavages. However, it is rather misleading to argue exclusively for one factor or one aspect of the conflict. We need an integrative framework that combines several factors in a systematic way and has room for the dynamics and evolution of the conflict, rather than a static model of polarization (McCoy, Rahman, and Somer 2018). Several structural, institutional, and individual-level factors are involved, and each of them impacts the polarized conflict to varying degrees in different ways. To understand the crisis and ongoing polarized conflicts in Thailand, we need to understand both layers of conflict—the elite and the masses. The interaction of these two layers, aided by individual, institutional, structural, and ideological factors, has produced the pernicious polarization witnessed in Thailand since 2005.
Elite struggle and individual level factor
As discussed above, Thaksin strived for a monopoly of power in electoral politics. His campaign centered primarily on nationalist policies to rescue the business sector and populist policies to help the poor in both rural and urban areas. This strategy proved to be highly popular given the hardships faced by both these groups in the post-1997 economic crisis. In the process, this policy campaign helped to bring forth a political transformation from factional politics to party-dominated, policy-oriented politics led by a populist leader. Thaksin’s party and its populist policies mobilized state resources to address the social grievances and political aspirations of the rural electorate, who had become a vital social force beginning in the late 1990s. In terms of electoral politics, the rural electorate is highly significant, as it accounts for two-thirds of the votes.
Thaksin, however, is not a left-wing populist in the style of Chaves and Morales in Latin America, nor a European-type right-wing populist (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2011; Roberts 2006). One scholar labeled his approach “populism for capitalism” (Kasian 2006). This populism evolved over time. In the beginning, Thaksin and his party did not position themselves as a populist party; it was his critics who labeled his policies “populist.” (Yoshifumi 2009). Originally, Thaksin’s policies were aimed primarily to win votes from the majority. 7 He also aimed to pacify the masses and prevent a mass uprising that might have resulted from shared discontent among the lower classes after the economic crisis. Only when Thaksin was attacked by the establishment did he begin using populist rhetoric and practices to mobilize the masses, personify his leadership, and strongly challenge the established elites. The Red Shirt movement emerged only after the 2006 coup, when Thaksin was ousted by his opponents. Without an organized mass movement, Thaksin realized that his government was vulnerable in the face of an attack by the old elites. Polarization in Thailand was thus being fueled by an action-reaction dynamic.
Why did traditional elites feel threatened by Thaksin? The answers lie in both material and psychological aspects. Thaksin’s immense popularity and his dominant party challenged the power, interest, and prestige of the network monarchy, including the monarchy’s “claim to be the sole focus of political loyalty” (Phongpaichit and Baker 2009, 89) and its role as the supreme political authority, guide, and final arbiter of Thai polity. Moreover, with a succession crisis, and the crown prince being unpopular and uncharismatic but close to Thaksin, the network monarchy feared that Thaksin would become a kingmaker during a succession and could assert strong influence over the palace in the next reign (Winichakul 2016).
We cannot downplay the psychological effects of the succession crisis, which seemed to cloud the judgement of those in the palace circle. Network monarchy is fundamentally a personalized network centered on the monarch and deriving its power from the king’s charisma. When the network’s head figure changed, the power of the whole network was reduced. Not only power and prestige are at stake. In terms of economic interest, the royal family’s Crown Property Bureau (CPB) is one of the largest business conglomerates in Thailand, with assets worth some US$41 billion in 2005 (Hewison 2012, 149–50; Ouyyanont 2008). CPB is an opaque organization: exempt from taxes, protected by the palace, and lacking transparency and public accountability. Beginning in the 1950s, the power of the royal-military alliance had increased and never been subdued or reformed, giving them the capacity to intervene in and destabilize politics when they deemed the situation threatening to their interests.
Nevertheless, Thaksin’s authoritarian, illiberal tendencies (Satha-Anand 2006; cf. Zakaria 2007) worsened the situation by pushing a number of media figures, nongovernment organizations (NGO) activists, and academics, who would have been expected to support democracy, to instead ally with the royal-military elite. With Thaksin’s strong rule and divisive rhetoric and practices, these civil society actors were intimidated and suppressed. They were also concerned by the erosion of democratic institutions under Thaksin, and his government’s human rights violations and suppression of civil liberties and freedom. They disapproved of Thaksin’s attempts to undermine checks and balances. While the poor admired Thaksin because he spoke for them, his critics thought he had become increasingly autocratic. They felt that, under Thaksin, their political space shrunk and their influence disappeared. Eventually, they chose to support the anti-Thaksin elite in bringing Thaksin down. Unfortunately, in 2006 and 2014 the royal-military elite replaced Thaksin’s illiberal democracy with military authoritarianism, deepening the crisis of Thailand’s democracy. In comparative perspective, the dynamic of Thailand’s polarization was similar to the situation in Venezuela and Turkey under the leadership of Hugo Chavez and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, respectively, in which the elected populist leader turned more authoritarian and illiberal, provoking angry protests from the middle class and old elites. In Thailand, however, where the establishment is powerful, the end result of the tussle was the ousting of the elected populist leader and democratic breakdown. 8
Institutional factors: Changing the rules of the game
It should be noted here that the constitution’s rules and its institutional mechanisms played a part in creating a crisis in two ways. First, with its intent to strengthen the position of prime minister and stabilize the government, the 1997 constitution gave enormous power to the prime minister over Members of Parliament (MPs) and his own party members, and made it relatively difficult for the Lower House to hold the prime minister accountable. Second, the mixed member proportional (MMP) electoral system, with its disproportional nature, gave Thaksin’s party a lot of “extra” seats, so they overwhelmingly dominated the parliament. For example, in the 2011 election, TRT gained 44 percent in constituency votes and 48 percent in party list votes, but obtained 53 percent of the seats in parliament.
The opposition party’s inability to reform itself, come up with a viable alternative policy platform, and play under democratic rules was another important factor in the crisis. With its narrow support base, the Democrat Party has failed to win elections since 1995. It mainly positioned itself as the party of the urban middle class in Bangkok and relatively affluent voters in the South (both of which are minorities in national politics), while failing to win support from rural voters in the North and Northeast due to its elitist outlook and urban-biased policies. It is important to understand the regional composition of MP seats in Thailand, which explains Thaksin’s success and the failure of the opposition: MP seats in the South and Bangkok combined total is 86, while the North and Northeast have 193. As long as the Democrat Party fails to win support in the relatively poor North and Northeast regions, it will not be able to win elections. Since Thaksin came to power, the Democrat Party has lost to Thaksin-backed parties in every election. During the crisis in 2005–2006, the party boycotted the election and decided to side with the Yellow Shirts and network monarchy in toppling Thaksin through extraparliamentary tactics. In 2014, it boycotted the election again and this time directly led the mass protests that eventually paved the way for the coup in May of that year (Kongkirati 2016a).
The quasi-judiciary and independent institutions created by the 1997 constitution to function as checks and balances also failed to do their job because of a lack of capacity and integrity, unclear jurisdictions and scope of power, and interference from Thaksin and the old elites. When Thaksin was dominant, these institutions ruled in his favor. But later, when the establishment decided to eliminate Thaksin, they switched sides. The constitutional court disbanded the Thaksin-allied parties twice and banned hundreds of their party members, disqualified two prime ministers from Thaksin’s camp, blocked constitutional amendment attempts, and nullified the elections in 2006 and 2014, leading to political deadlock and military coups in both years. The highly partisan nature of these accountability mechanisms, and especially the politicization of the judiciary (Dressel 2010), polarized the country even further, as it undermined the rule of law and detracted from peaceful means to settle conflicts under a democratic polity.
Structural and ideological factors: Inequality, political disenfranchisement, and contested ideologies
Beyond the elite level, polarization in Thailand has deep structural roots. Social and economic inequality and political disenfranchisement constitute significant structural factors and grievances. These problems of inequality and exclusion are related to underlying social cleavages based on class, ideology, the rural-urban divide, and regional identity. We cannot single out one cleavage as the only explanatory factor in polarized conflicts. In Thailand’s context, these cleavages were reinforcing and interrelated in establishing conditions for the emergence of both the anti- and pro-Thaksin movements.
As mentioned earlier, polarization in Thailand involved not only the elite but also a large number of ordinary people. At its peak, both the Yellow Shirt and Red Shirt movements mobilized 200,000–300,000 of their supporters to join protests on the street (Nostitz 2014). Several more millions support them through movement-owned media channels (radio stations, magazines, and satellite TV stations). The Thaksin-backed party and the Democrat Party had 15 million and 11 million voters on their side, respectively, in the 2011 election.
Socioeconomic and ideological factors can account for the division between the Yellow and the Red camps. Socioeconomic factors explain the social origin of each movement, and ideological factors help to explain the commitment and enthusiasm of movement participants. Polarization between the pro-Thaksin and anti-Thaksin coalitions is broadly based on regional, urban-rural, and class division. Considering the voting pattern in the elections from 2001 to 2014, we see a clear repeated pattern in which Thaksin gained an overwhelming number of votes in the North and Northeast regions plus some provinces in the Central region and the surrounding provinces of Bangkok, while the Democrats dominated in the South and among Bangkok’s urban districts. The political division exhibited in this stable pattern of voting is a result and indication of Thailand’s social inequality. Several pieces of research demonstrate that structural inequality is the underlying cause of political and social polarization in Thailand. Compared with neighboring countries in Southeast Asia, Thailand’s income distribution is more unequal (UNDP 2010). The Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, has gradually worsened, and, with the exception of a brief period in the early 2000s, has shown no sign of improvement (0.341 in 2017). By 2012, the income differential between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent of the population was approximately 13 times, compared with four times in Japan and Scandinavia and six to eight times in North America and Europe. The only countries that have a worse record of income distribution than Thailand are in Latin America (Phongpaichit and Baker 2012, 218–19). In this sense, the crisis manifested in Thailand corresponds to the argument that inequality tends to undermine the stability of a democratic regime “because elites have more to lose from redistributive policies that tend to result from majority rule” (Acemoglu and Robinson 2006, 35–8).
Support for Thaksin has been strong in the North and Northeast, where incomes are relatively low and poverty is pronounced. Even though absolute poverty has fallen over time, the income disparity has widened. More than 80 percent of the population with the lowest income is concentrated in rural areas in the North and Northeast (and the Deep South). In 2007, average incomes in the North and Northeast were about one-third of those in the capital. Data also show that the provinces that voted for the Democrat Party have average per capita gross provincial product of 221,130 baht per year, contrasted with 92,667 baht for provinces that voted for the Thaksin-backed party (UNDP Report 2009 quoted in Hewison 2012, 156). In addition, a national survey found that people who joined the Red Shirt movement had lower incomes, less education, and lower levels of job/life security (as the majority of them work in agriculture and the informal economic sector) than those who supported the Yellow Shirts (Sathitniramai et al. 2013).
It is not a coincidence that the majority of Red Shirt supporters come from the North and Northeast and suburbs of Bangkok, where migrant workers from the Northeast are concentrated. Core members of the Red Shirt movement are drawn from rural farmers from these poor regions. Though many of them also obtain a chunk of their family income from nonfarm jobs, they still maintain their peasant, rural identity (Walker 2012; Keyes 2014). In Thailand, regional cleavages, the urban-rural divide, and class division are mutually reinforcing. But the polarizing conflict between the anti- and pro-Thaksin forces makes the multiplicity of interests and identities in Thai society “align along a single dimension, splitting into two opposing camps with [an] impermeable boundary and perceived zero-sum interests and mutually exclusive identities. Adversaries become enemies to be eliminated” (McCoy and Rahman 2016, 26). In Thailand, a constructed, color-coded identity has become a fixed political identity that defines the people’s political positions and interests.
It is true that wealth disparities, and the underdevelopment of the North and Northeast, have existed in Thailand for decades, so the question is why polarization has developed now. The underlying condition of inequality was activated by several intervening factors in the late 1990s. The critical juncture was 1997, when the country witnessed three developments: the most severe financial crisis in its modern history; the new constitution, which changed the rules of the game; and the decentralization program, which affected state structure. The financial crisis made poor people more distressed and changed the power balance among the elite. The new constitution provided an advantage to a large party that could come up with a policy-based campaign and vast resources. And decentralization empowered local voters and made them aware of the power of the ballot. Frequent local elections strengthened electoral democracy at the grassroots level and decreased the power of the old bureaucratic machine.
Prior to 1997, almost no political parties offered concrete policies to voters, as the parties were built around a small network of business or bureaucratic cadets who lacked a clear ideological platform. Weak coalitions meant that elected governments failed to last long enough to implement policies and respond to voters. The Thaksin party’s populist package and strong government changed Thai politics, making democracy “eatable” (the Red Shirt term) in the views of a marginalized electorate. Under Thaksin, these voters felt empowered, and they aspired to better opportunities in life—education for children, cheap health care for the elderly, micro-credits for investment, and so on. When Thaksin was ousted unconstitutionally, they felt that not only had “their leader” been brought down illegitimately, but also that progress in their lives had been put on hold by the establishment and urban elites. Unfulfilled political and social desires and yearning for political recognition played very important roles in the political mobilization of the Red Shirts (cf. Sopranzetti 2012; Ferrara 2015). The Red Shirt movement is neither an anticapitalist movement nor revolutionary. Its members demand basic equal political rights under electoral democracy, responsive government, and wider opportunities for social mobility. The Red Shirts perceived Thaksin’s policies as an attempt to attenuate through redistribution the negative effects that the capital-wielding urban elites have on the social mobility of the disempowered rural and urban working class.
On the other side of the political division, the urban middle class opposed Thaksin because they found his “populist” rhetoric and practices repugnant and irresponsible. Given Thaksin’s populist platform, which emphasized the rural and informal sectors, the urban middle class also felt that they were the ones who would bear the cost (through the income tax) of populist programs that benefited the lower class much more than them. They feared that their living standards and status would cease to improve or even deteriorate. The anxiety of the middle class was “about the threat to its social status and economic position presented by more inclusive political systems that confer upon provincial voters the power to choose the country’s government” (Ferrara 2015, 273). 9
Usually in Thailand, urban middle-class citizens are influential in shaping public opinion and social agendas through public space. But when it comes to electoral politics, they become a minority who are outnumbered by their rural countrymen, a situation that makes them feel powerless. When Thaksin cemented electoral support from rural voters in a way no politician had successfully done before, the middle class eventually turned against not only Thaksin but electoral democracy itself. In 2014, middle-class protesters led by the PDRC disrupted the voting process and publicly stated that the basic principle of “one man, one vote” is not suitable for Thailand, where the majority of voters are still poor, uneducated, and ignorant. This notion on the part of the urban middle class was based on their longstanding cultural bias toward rural people. The cultural bias was not new; what was new was the way the urban elites appropriated this cultural prejudice to legitimize their political campaign to deprive rural people of the right to vote. The PDRC was the first social movement in Thailand that mobilized mass support against the electoral process and institutions (Kongkirati 2016a).
It should be noted, however, that Thaksin’s rise did not change the attitudes of the middle class immediately. In 2001 and 2005, TRT won the majority of seats in Bangkok by a wide margin. So the middle class’s opposition to Thaksin grew gradually over time along with Thaksin’s aggrandizement and the traditional elite’s maneuvers to eliminate him. Therefore, both objective reality and the framing of the conflict came into play in shaping attitudes and behaviors that led to polarization. Royalist elites and anti-Thaksin media were “effective in arousing the insecurities and fears of urban middle-class voters, warning that Thaksin’s populism would come at the expense of their economic well-being and social status” (Ferrara 2015, 257).
The changing media landscape helped to stoke political tension. The anti-Thaksin camp used social media and satellite TV (owned by a Yellow Shirt leader, Sondhi Limthongkul) to spread rumors, slander, false and distorted information, and accusations against Thaksin and his supporters. Later, the Red Shirts copied the same tactics, using their own TV stations and radio channels to propagate information and narratives to counter the Yellow Shirt media. The media has become a space of fierce political battle, flooded with hate speech and malign messages rather than public deliberation. Demonization and dehumanization are pervasive. The Yellow Shirts called the Red Shirts “buffalo,” “lizard,” and “scum of the earth,” while the Red Shirts called the Democrat Party the “cockroach party.” One observer points to “the increasing segmentation of information markets” in Thai society, which provided “little scope for negotiating principled political differences.” (Unger 2012, 321). Thai people perceived political contestation with fervent emotions of love and hate, as if they were watching sports or reality TV (see McCargo 2009). People on opposing political sides have different political realities, consuming different news and living in two different worlds. Since 2014, cyber policing, cyber witch-hunts, and mass propaganda by state-controlled media and electronic media under the military regime have further exacerbated social conflict (see Laungaramsri 2016).
To conclude, class structure along with regional and urban-rural disparities provided the conditions for mass mobilization and the resulting polarization in Thailand. But elite struggle is what activated the existing social cleavages, and ideological framing exacerbated and deepened the polarization to the extent that it spiraled out of the elites’ control. Political conflicts in Thailand have been gradually framed and perceived by both sides as “warfare”—black/white; us/them; uncompromising fighting between the “good” and the “bad”; “moral, clean, enlightened” and “immoral, corrupt, stupid” people; “patriots” and “traitors”; and “aristocrats” and “commoners.” Political entrepreneurs on both sides have produced divisive discourse and rival images and symbols. The Yellow Shirts and traditional elites want to restore and uphold “Thai-style democracy” (i.e., despotic paternalism or elitist democracy), with royalist nationalism and a hierarchical social order drawing on traditional cultural values. By contrast, the Red Shirts espouse “populist democracy” with a strong elected government, popular nationalism, and an egalitarian social order drawing on the basic principle of political equality.
Consequences: Street Violence, Political Instability, and Democratic Breakdown
Deep polarization has made Thai politics a deadly game that is dysfunctional and unstable. Since the crisis started in 2005, there has been no consensus among power elites or civil society groups around basic “rules of the game,” which made the country highly volatile. Dysfunctional politics has also disrupted growth and bred more deadly conflict. Since 2005, Thailand has had seven prime ministers (five elected, two installed by military coup), four general elections (and two nullified elections), two military coups, and four violent crackdowns on public protests. Two popularly elected prime ministers have been ousted by outright military coups, and the other two by court rulings. The April–May 2010 military crackdown on the pro-Thaksin movement under the Democrat Party was the most violent political suppression in modern Thai history, with an official death toll exceeding those of previous political crises (Kongkirati 2013).
With the latest coup in 2014, Thailand is back to being ruled by strong military authoritarianism, the most repressive since 1976. The coup was an attempt by the royal-military elites to eliminate Thaksin’s influence in Thai politics and restore the power of the unelected minority elite. Political and social division have not been resolved but have been suppressed with brute force. The country has remained torn apart by various forms of civil strife and deep division, and it is still far from being able to reach a new political order deemed legitimate and acceptable by all conflicting entities. The new constitution promulgated in 2017 is likely to further exacerbate the conflict and deepen confrontation between opposing movements, as it clearly establishes a political system that maintains the dominance of the royal-military power bloc and unelected institutions at the expense of politicians and civil society groups (Kongkirati 2016b).
Footnotes
Notes
Prajak Kongkirati is an assistant professor, head of the Government Department, and director of the Direk Jayanama Research Center, Faculty of Political Science, at Thammasat University in Thailand. He is on the editorial board of Thammasat Review of Economic and Social Policy, and the Asian Democracy Review. His current research project is the study of military authoritarianism in Thailand in comparative perspective.