By Dan Waites
On Friday, Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva announced he would dissolve Parliament in the first week of May, paving the way for Thailand’s next general election to take place in June or July. Last year’s red shirt protests, which resulted in the deaths of 91 people and injuries to at least 2,000, aimed to force Abhisit to dissolve parliament immediately. One year later, the United front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) will get the elections it wanted. But what do these polls really mean for the red shirt movement?
The UDD is set to take its “fight for real democracy” or “fight to bring back Thaksin Shinawatra” – depending on who you ask – to the ballot box. The seven recently bailed red shirt leaders will stand as Pheu Thai candidates. On Saturday night, Thaksin phoned in from Dubai to 50,000 red supporters gathered at Democracy Monument on Ratchadamnoen Klang Avenue, telling them to vote for Pheu Thai. “If you vote [for Pheu Thai] to win by a landslide, I would come back to solve Thailand’s economic problems and make the country boom again within six months,” he said, not a man known for modesty.
But is a landslide for Pheu Thai really on the cards? Today, the party has 189 of the 480 seats in Parliament. The Democrat Party has 172. At by-elections on December 12, Pheu Thai failed to make electoral inroads. In a short analysis, Federico Ferrara of the City University of Hong Kong commented, “If this trend were to hold in a general election, [Pheu] Thai will not meaningfully improve on the seat share it currently controls.” True, you can’t reliably extrapolate by-election results into general election results. But the signs are not encouraging.
And then there’s the coalition’s public spending programme, or “pre-election splurge”, as Tim Johnston at the Financial Times has called it. The government is spending US$10m a day on diesel subsidies, subsidising a range of other commodities and enforcing controls in a bid to keep prices down. Over recent months it has raised minimum wages and boosted civil servants’ salaries. And let’s not forget about Pracha Wiwat, the nine gifts the government is generously buying “all Thais” with their tax money (see this interesting piece). Included in that programme is an expansion of the social security system to 24 million workers in the informal sector, and measures aimed at helping taxi and motorbike drivers – Thaksin’s traditional vote base.

Red shirt protesters rally in Bangkok Saturday. Pic: AP.
Meanwhile, earlier this year the Democrat Party pushed through a convenient amendment to the electoral system. Right now, there are 480 seats in the House of Representatives: 400 directly elected MPs and 80 “party list” MPs. In the next election, directly elected seats will be reduced to 375, party list seats boosted to 125. The Democrats have tended to do better than the opposition in the party-list vote. Plus the changes will mean the redrawing of constituency boundaries, and all the advantages that entails for those in power.
Of course there are any number of sticks Pheu Thai can use to beat the government, and we’ll be seeing a few of them over the next few days during the censure debate. There have been shortages of important commodities such as sugar and palm oil. Relations with Cambodia are deteriorating. Violence is spiralling out of control in the Deep South. The government’s investigation into the 91 deaths during the red shirt protests appears to be turning into a whitewash amid ludicrous claims that the protesters “ran into bullets”. And when even Sondhi Limthongkul says there is more corruption now than under Thaksin, you have a problem. But even so, it’s far from clear that Pheu Thai, without a credible leader, has anything close to the upper hand.
There are obviously a number of potential scenarios in terms of the election results. The Democrats could win a majority. Pheu Thai could win a majority. The smaller parties all have their own role to play. But one  scenario that has to be considered is for Pheu Thai to remain the largest in Parliament, but fail to secure a majority. In this case, what is to stop the same governing coalition from reassembling again? Here is The Nation in December 2008, on the “shotgun wedding” that led to the current coalition government:
A key leader of one of the former coalition parties said most parties had moved to the Democrat camp due to a request by a senior military figure, who was conveying a message from a man who could not be refuted.
Besides, he said, all parties knew that if the Pheu Thai were to take over, anti-government protesters would take to the streets again.
Another source said that if Pheu Thai did form the next government, the military would definitely have to stage a coup.
The same pressures remain present today. Some of the coalition partners may have grumbled about their treatment by the Democrats, but are they about to join a coalition with Pheu Thai amid persistent rumours of a coup? The real aim of such rumours may well be to convince smaller parties – such as Chart Thai Pattana – that switching sides would invite military intervention.
Pheu Thai stands every chance of being frozen out of government again. Where would that leave the UDD? They would still have grounds to argue Thailand’s democracy is not working properly. Coalitions should be formed freely, not under pressure from men with tanks. But this argument would have diminishing resonance among a people tiring of conflict and anxious to put this political crisis behind them. Or they might seize on accusations of electoral fraud and claim the election was unfair – though on past form, vote buying can be expected by all sides.
At Saturday’s rally at Democracy Monument, I met Sombat Boon-ngam-anong, the leader of the Red Sunday group. He conceded that Pheu Thai might not win a majority at the polls. He still thought it would be the largest party. When I suggested to him that the current coalition, or something similar, could remain in power, he said: “If Pheu Thai cannot be the government, it’s OK because we have the system of democracy. Democracy is more important than who is in government. We respect the people. We respect the people’s choice.” This may be enough for Sombat, who has always stressed the fight is more about rights than about Thaksin. Will it be enough for the rest of the UDD?
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