Blood rather than ballots in Thailand

October 15th, 2008

Authors: Andrew Walker and Nicholas Farrelly, New Mandala

If you do the numbers it is clear that the People’s Alliance for Democracy
(PAD) leadership has chosen bloodshed over ballots.

The PAD has abandoned electoral politics. With no coherent or credible

political platform their only hope is that sufficient blood will be spilt to
prompt a military or royal strike against Thailand’s democratically elected
government. But the army appears unwilling to act. The queen has
publicly shown her support for the PAD, but the king himself has remained
silent. And the international community, for its part, is standing firmly by
the government.

Make no mistake, the PAD leadership wants blood on the streets and have
rushed to turn the imagery of violence to their advantage.

The numerous well-intentioned statements and petitions that are

circulating calling on “all sides to avoid violence” are missing this basic
point. Violence is not an unfortunate by-product of the current political
standoff. It is now the core plank in the PAD provocateur platform.

What occurred last Tuesday is the inevitable result of a deliberate

strategy that the PAD has pursued since early 2008. In the wake of the
disappointing 2007 election, which returned a Thaksin-esque government
to power, the PAD has abandoned any pretence of respect for electoral
decisions. Their central ideological claim has been that the “tyranny of the
majority” can only be overcome by extraordinary action. Just how
extraordinary remains to be seen.

The “tyranny of the majority” is a bogeyman that has been effectively

deployed by the PAD to create an impression of a government that enjoys
a hegemonic dictatorship of democracy.

But how firm are the electoral foundations of the government’s so-called
tyranny?

Let’s take a look at the December 2007 election results. In that election
there were two electoral components – a constituency vote in which 400
seats were up for grabs; and a “party-list” vote for an additional 80 seats.

The government’s People Power Party (PPP) won 199 constituency seats
with about 37 percent of constituency votes cast. It was a solid victory
over the Democrats who won 132 seats with about 30 percent of
constituency votes cast. And that is where the electoral difference lay. In
the party list system the vote was virtually even, with PPP gaining only
one more party list seat than the Democrats.
Overall, PPP won 233 seats, just 7 short of an absolute majority. They
clearly won a right to govern and it is unsurprising that minor parties
joined with PPP to form a coalition. It was, under all the circumstances, a
solid PPP victory. But does the result really form a basis for electoral
tyranny? Is now the time for opposition forces to abandon electoral hope?
Does a 7 percent victory in the constituency vote justify a street rebellion?
Is there no other way of changing an elected government?

Just think about the figures for a moment. On the face of it, if four out of
every hundred constituency voters had cast their votes for the Democrats
instead of PPP the political landscape after December 2007 would have
been very different. If the Democrats had managed to win just 34 more
constituency seats they would have been the largest party in the
parliament with, one must assume, a very strong claim to government.

And there were plenty of constituency seats that could have been won.
We’ve taken a quick look at the constituency results, and some of the
figures are very interesting indeed.

We have identified 22 close constituency contests where a Democrat was

the highest ranked unsuccessful candidate (remember that most
consistencies elect more than one MP). On average, across these 22
constituencies, an additional 6381 votes would have put an extra
Democrat into parliament. Some contests were very close. One Democrat
missed out by just 36 votes, another by 539. In many contests only a few
thousand votes, less than a couple of percent of votes cast, were required
for an additional Democrat seat in parliament. There were 12 seats where
a Democrat candidate lost by less than 5000. Just over 140,000 votes, in
total, would have delivered an additional Democrat MP in all of these 22
constituencies. This represents just over 1.25 % of the total constituency
votes cast in these contests. Hardly an insurmountable target.

Note that this is a very preliminary analysis based on cases where a

Democrat was the highest ranked unsuccessful candidate. There are other
cases (we have identified 6) where lower ranked Democrats could have
succeeded with similarly modest increases in their vote. Of course, there
are also constituencies where PPP would have lost to minor parties with
small shifts in voting patterns.

And, don’t forget, there is also a substantial percentage of the electorate

(around 20 percent) that didn’t vote in 2007 that could probably be
persuaded to enter the electoral fray by a well executed political
campaign. Motivating just one in ten of these to get out and vote against
the PPP could have an enormous impact.

The notion that the current government enjoys an unassailable electoral

hegemony is simply wrong.

Like any elected government, PPP is electorally vulnerable and could be

defeated. Its performance since the election has hardly been stunning. It
has been pummelled by the courts and the media. It won’t escape the
electoral backlash that follows the international economic crisis. Factions
within the deeply divided PPP are flexing their muscle. Party dissolution
and reformation will shift the political landscape yet again.

Plenty of parliamentary seats are there for the taking.

But the PAD leadership doesn’t want to embark on a broad based political
campaign to unseat the government by electoral means, either in alliance
with any existing party or independently. The PAD might not love the
Democrats but they clearly represent a basis for an alternative
government.

In October 2006 we saw Sondhi Limthongkul speak (at SOAS in London)

about his plans for an education campaign to win over a vanguard of
provincial middle-class voters as a counterweight to Thaksin’s populism.
It was an elitist vision, but still an electoral one. But Sondhi’s electoral
stamina was short-lived. Now it seems that persuading a small percentage
of the electorate to vote against the government is beyond the wit of
Sondhi, the PAD and their formidable public relations machine. Instead
they have adopted an electorally unsaleable “new politics” in which some
parliamentarians (perhaps 70 percent) would be appointed. There is
simply no need for such electoral defeatism.

We can only conclude that Sondhi and the PAD leadership have
deliberately chosen blood rather than ballots.

They will happily sacrifice the bodies of their hard-core supporters

because they have neither the ability nor the will to shift the hearts and
minds of even a small portion of Thailand’s swinging voters.