Maybe I am being paranoid, but there was an editorial in the Bangkok Post today that talked about the deep political divisions that remain in Thai society, as attested by the election on Sunday in one Bangkok district. In the course of the editorial, this paragraph appeared:

"The margin of victory, however, was slim enough to show that this country is still widely divided. It was clear by late Sunday evening that even a jailed candidate, accused of violent acts and terrorism, had made the election a close one. A national vote must come by December next year, barring some change to the Constitution."

When I read that last sentence, I could not help but wonder if this is a trial balloon set into motion by Bangkok elite to test the waters for trying to postpone elections indefinitely. If the people running things now know that their servile Democrats are likely to lose power in a national election, as they have done the last three elections, might they try anything to postpone elections indefinitely ? Is the shoe about to drop and Thailand on the road to losing the last pretenses of being a democracy ?

http://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/opinion...-constituency-6

That's quite a mouthful, but hardly surprising, if you accept the premise that the Democrats are incapable of winning a national election, even with army backing, especially in the aftermath of the most recent Bangkok massacres. If you know you can't win the election, the next question is how do you stop having elections and freeze the power structure as is.

Just imagine what might happen if the monarch should pass on and a new state of emergency is announced to "keep a dignified peace" during a protracted national state of mourning - during which it would be unseemly to hold political campaigns - or elections. If you think the current judiciary would be prepared to order elections under those circumstances, then you haven't been paying much attention to what's been happening here for the four years since the coup.

It's not like it hasn't been done before. General Prem served as prime minister for 8 years without elections.

A lot of people think he's the de facto prime minister right now.

I grant you that the old men who are apprently running things now are dinosaurs. I do not think however that they would have the balls to just cancel elections and install a military-backed regime like Prem ran in the 1980's. Things have progressed too far since then to even think about how the political opposition and the outside world would react to cancellation of elections.

That's what they all said about Thai coups, just before they launched the last one in September, 2006, two months before parliamentary elections were to be held in which Thaksin's party looked set to win big again. There's no reason to suppose that this cabal isn't capable of orchestrating that same kind of scenario again, if they see a major election debacle for the Democrats looming at the polls next year. Their willingness thus far to use violence against protesters and the State of Emergency to annul basic civil rights is not a good omen for the future. They may be political dinosaurs but they're anything but extinct.

Not living full-time in Thailand probably gives me a different take on the politics there. I cannot imagine that the people running things now think they could postpone elections without creating a tremendous negative world reaction. As weak as Abhisit seem to be as a leader, he surely is not so detached from reality to think that he can continue to rule by Emergency Decree much longer.

Abhisit cannot win any fair elections and I think his days are numbered: he will be removed from the office
after the end of annual reshuffle in the Army and appoinment new Commander in Chief in September.
One possible mechanism of removal is through the Decision of Constitutional court on one of Democrat's case (conveniently expected in October -November) but other mechanisms are also possible.

I don't think they will dump Abhisit until they decide on whether and when to hold the next elections. Once they decide, they will dump him because he has too much baggage from the Bangkok killings. The real wild card in any planning is the status of the King and the uncertainty his death would cause in the political system. I don't think they would hesitate to cancel elections as part of the official mourning period if he dies before the next elections have to be held. I don't think that the people who shot General Khattaya and gave the OK to shoot all those protesters are going to get squeamish about inventing reasons for not holding elections, including staged bombings or even attempted assassinations as an excuse for declaring a state of emergency and canceling elections. Once you have resorted to murder as a political weapon, everything else is a piece of cake.