It is hard not to love Thailand. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to respect their religion nor a monarchist to respect their king. Its reputation as a sex centre is ill-deserved; it’s a highly conservative society but one not concerned, not even able to conceptualise, what happens behind closed doors.
Now, the kingdom is in serious trouble. The baht has slipped 10 per cent in a year. Though its economy is the second largest in the region, its annual growth rate is about half of what it should be. My American-educated friend, Jay Thitinan Pongsudhirak, has written persuasively about the underlying problem: General Prayuth Chan-o-cha, who has backed himself into his own corner.
The general staged the coup in May 2014 “on the pretext of making Thailand work again, clearing away corruption, and instituting reforms to make the country, once and for all, a disciplined democracy of sorts, underpinned by traditional values and institutions”. Prayuth backed himself into a corner with a tight schedule that now is impossible to meet, making it well-nigh inevitable that he will be leading a dictatorship for a long time to come. True, the demonstrations that blocked the new airport and Bangkok’s central crossroads are gone, and Prayuth will be in place, after “the Long Goodbye” to the beloved king, to ensure the safety and position of the now-Crown Prince onto the throne. He will be 10th of the dynasty, long foretold as the last.
Prayuth might have based his rule on competent bureaucrats, not in short supply, ensuring legitimacy, but he put few of these in place. The Democrat Party, one of the region’s oldest, has behaved dysfunctionally, power struggle obviously behind the scenes. Civil society non-governmental organisations have tacitly supported the regime, but such can’t be counted on for long. Sooner, rather than later, they will be out in front, less to undermine the monarchy as usual, than to evict the military. That would simply be the latest of their multiple attempts, some successful, to bring juntas down.
Your correspondent first visited the kingdom 45 years ago, and thanks to a princely PhD from his own college, soon met literally all the next decades’ senior diplomats and professional ministers. The most senior of these, who served at the palace, as foreign minister, ambassador to the Court of St James’s, to France and most importantly Beijing, still kindly sends clippings every week from the Bangkok press that don’t make it online, but are essential to grasping the kingdom’s fast-moving evolution.
I learned, as I have stated here before, that in the Thai mind, there is no confusion between military and civilian; historically, they were interchangeable. Such is no longer the case, thanks to the emergence of civil society — and currently to the antics of Prayuth, who loses his temper in press conferences and seems to take Donald Trump as his model. As Dr Thitinan writes, “Liberal and progressive anti-coup civil society activists will rise up increasingly but only to face more repression. Their pent-up frustration may reach a combustible point down the road when the military-dominated status quo comes under pressure”.
Prayuth insists an election will be held at year’s end, others insist that the new draft constitution provides for one a year later. This confusion has the effect of lengthening the stay of the regime.
I have visited the kingdom for 45 years, but have never seen it in a more hopeless situation. Always before, angels seem to swoop down from heaven, a great deus ex machina or whatever; or His Majesty the King intervenes after the essential conflict has been settled and then compels the competitors to sit on their knees in the Presence and reconcile. This cannot happen now. I remain a lucky guest at Dr Thitinan’s influential centre, smack in the middle of Bangkok at the royal university, Chulalongkorn. From there, it is easy to see the points of the compass, and they all now point to impasse, as capital flees, politicians hedge bets, a former dictator’s sister waits nervously for the outcome of the legal process judging alleged massive corruption in a massive rice-buying scheme, His Majesty serenely lies in his Hua Hin palace as the Crown Prince does in his German palace.
Somewhere there is a hopeful point of the compass that is as yet impossible to discern.
W. Scott Thompson is professor emeritus of international politics, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the United States