Peter Goodspeed: Sister of fugitive former leader leads in Thai election
Jun 18, 2011 – 9:00 AM ET | Last Updated: Jun 17, 2011 9:45 PM ET
Damir Sagolj/Reuters
Yingluck Shinawatra, the prime ministerial candidate for Thailand's main opposition, was recruited by her brother, toppled leader Thaksin Shinawatra.
Goodspeed Analysis
Fear and femininity dominate what may be the most crucial election in Thailand in decades.
Politics in the coup-prone kingdom are usually muscularly masculine — it's had 18 coups and 23 military governments since 1932. Women rarely account for more than 15% of election candidates and have almost never have any real power.
But this year is different.
Yingluck Shinawatra, 43, the youngest sister of Thaksin Shinawatra, the fugitive former prime minister, is surging ahead in public opinion polls and may be poised to become Thailand's first female PM in the July 3 vote.
The photogenic former business executive, who used to run the Thaksin family's property development company, was recruited last month by her exiled brother to run another family business, the pro-Thaksin Pheu Thai (For Thais) party.
Initially dismissed as a political novice, Ms. Yingluck was widely regarded as a figurehead and a stand-in for her brother. Despite being deposed in a 2006 coup and banned from politics for five years in 2008 after being sentenced to two years in prison for corruption, Mr. Thakshin continues to dominate Thai politics.
He did not dispel the notion when, from his self-imposed exile in Dubai, he described his sister as his "clone" and said "We have the same way of thinking, the same DNA."
The party's campaign slogan is equally blunt: "Thaksin Thinks, Pheu Thai Acts."
Still, Ms. Yingluck's personal charisma seems to have caught fire with voters. Her party's standing in public opinion polls has risen steadily since she was named Pheu Thai's prime ministerial candidate on May 16.
Polls released in Bangkok Friday show the party cutting deeply into the ruling Democrat party's support with commanding leads in 18 of the capital's 33 constituencies, and nearly tied in another nine.
In the past, Mr. Thaksin's parties have drawn their strength from rural areas of northern Thailand and fared poorly in urban centres.
But Ms. Yingluck has changed the election chemistry.
She has refused to debate her main opponent, Abhisit Vejajiva, the Prime Minister, a British-born Eton and Oxford-educated lawyer. Instead, she tours the countryside, introducing herself as Mr. Thaksin's little sister to adoring crowds of Thaksin supporters and posing for photographs. She also delivers carefully scripted speeches, laced with promises to raise the minimum wage and increase prices paid to farmers for their rice.
"She is young, she is appealing and people don't really know her," says Duncan McCargo, a Thai specialist at Britain's University of Leeds.
"She doesn't have a negative image, as she doesn't have a lot of baggage personally. Yingluck has been able to go around presenting herself as this newcomer on the political stage."
Ms. Yingluck also seems to have knocked her male opponents off stride.
"The rules and conventions of Thai politics have been shaped by the male domination of the political world," says Chris Baker, a British analyst of Thai politics and Mr. Thaksin's biographer. "How do you attack this [female candidate] without looking like a brute?"
One of Pheu Thai's main election promises is to declare an amnesty for politicians caught up in infighting since the 2006 coup, effectively clearing the way for Mr. Thaksin's return and resurrection.
He has promised supporters he will return by December to attend his daughter's wedding.
That could trigger a massive new political crisis and has effectively turned the July 3 election into a referendum on Mr. Thaksin.
"The election could simply accelerate Thailand's political meltdown," warns Joshua Kurlantzick, a southeast Asian specialist with the Council for Foreign Relations.
"We are looking at a head-on collision between two power blocks," adds Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a Thai specialist at Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
In his heyday, Mr. Thaksin was the most successful politician in modern Thai history: he was the first prime minister to complete a full term in office and be re-elected.
Thailand's answer to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, he is a telecommunication billionaire who surged to power in 2001 with a powerful political machine that exploited Thailand's deep social divisions.
He appealed to the rural poor with policies promoting cheap health-care, income redistribution, micro-credit and local development grants. But he also exhibited an uncompromising authoritarian stance that rapidly saw him clash with the traditional establishment, led by monarchists, the military and the urban elite.
His two terms in office were also filled with allegations of corruption and cronyism, increased restrictions on the news media and severe human rights abuses, including the extrajudicial executions of about 2,800 suspected drug dealers.
When Mr. Thaksin ignored the elite and tried to fast-track his supporters in the armed forces, the military rebelled, staging a bloodless coup in September 2006.
But his removal from office did not end his political meddling, as he has continued to support proxies while living in exile.
The pro-Thaksin People's Power Party, a precursor to Pheu Thai, won a majority of seats in a 2007 election, only to be stripped of power and banned by Thailand's Constitutional Court.
When the current Democrat-led government was installed by a parliamentary vote in 2008, after backroom deals involving the military, Red Shirt protesters, many of them poor rural Thaksin supporters, blockaded Bangkok's commercial centre for nine weeks to demand new elections.
That confrontation ended in an army crackdown in which 91 people died, hundreds were wounded and dozens of buildings were set ablaze.
To this day, both sides blame the other for the deaths and destruction.
But rather than resolve the conflicts, the July 3 election is likely to lead to more confrontations in Parliament and on the streets, and possibly even in another military coup.
The Thai army chief, General Prayut Chan-O-Cha, took the unusual precaution this week of delivering a television address in which he urged voters to choose "good people" and warned, "If you allow a repeat of the same election pattern, then we will always get the same result."
The prospect of a Pheu Thai victory, nullified by another coup or a military-backed backroom deal, could set Thailand on fire once again.
"The lesson of previous elections has been that election results are not normally fixable in advance," says Mr. McCargo. "The 'wrong party' can often win elections and has won most of the elections of the past couple of decades."
"[When that happens], there is some post-election reckoning and reorganization which either leads to a dissolution of parliament and fresh elections or some sort of resolution along the lines of what we saw in 2008," he adds.
"One year after an election is a time of potential reorganization and change, where a lot of factors, other than the will of the voters, come into play and traditional institutions may be influencing things behind the scenes."
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