The National Legislative Assembly, handpicked by the junta after the coup, voted 190 to 18 to impeach Ms. Yingluck on the grounds that the rice subsidies were a form of corruption.And there you have it. Democracy cannot survive in a country where the economic and military power is concentrated on one side and the voters on the other. It may be that it can't survive if poor voters expect too much from the government. And it certainly is not a magical solution to all the problems of a troubled country.
The junta has not explained how people who no longer hold political office can be impeached.
Economists considered the rice program wasteful, and it angered members of the Bangkok establishment, who resented that their taxes were being used to pay farmers well above market prices for their rice. It was one of the key complaints of members of the Bangkok elite who led debilitating protests in Bangkok last year. They blocked voting in elections and pressured financial institutions to withhold payments to farmers.
Ms. Yingluck has defended the rice subsidy program as assistance for the poor. “Many governments have public policies to help farmers,” she said in testimony at the impeachment hearings. “It’s the government’s duty to look after them.”
The crowds who called for revolution in Cairo, Istanbul, Bangkok and Kiev this year are not the impoverished losers of globalization. They are, for the most part, the economic winners: middle-class, educated, secular, English-speaking. They’ve had the backing of big businessmen who have been enriched by trade, and, as often as not, the sympathy of the Obama administration and other Western governments.I think that last is unfair; Certainly Morsi and Chávez were pretty bad, but if Erdogan is too authoritarian for my taste he is not otherwise incompetent -- the Turkish economy is doing fine -- and Shinawatra's opponents have hardly given her a chance to run the country. The situation in Ukraine is complicated by ethnic issues (the country contains millions of Russians) and the country's position between Russia and the EU. The real issue is not competence but differing interests. Crafting a political system that creates real government legitimacy in a polarized situation is hard even in old democracies like ours.
So why are they rebelling? Because globalization is not merely an economic story. It is accompanied by the spread of freer and more inclusive elections to dozens of countries where they were previously banned or rigged. That has enabled the rise of populists who cater to globalization’s losers and who promise to crush the old establishment and even out the rewards. In country after country, they’ve succeeded in monopolizing the political system. Hence, the elite revolt.
Hugo Chávez, elected in Venezuela in 1998, was a pioneer of this trend. He was followed not just by other Latin American caudillos, but also by Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand, Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine and Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, among others. Yes, these rulers have many differences. But they have some big things in common: Their support comes disproportionately from poorer, less-educated and more rural voters, while their opponents are concentrated in cities, especially capitals. The populists are also good at winning elections, but bad at governing — except when it comes to delivering spoils to their followers.
Thaksin remains popular among poorer rural voters, who saw him as a populist ally, and despised by the educated, urban middle class, who viewed him as corrupt and authoritarian. Massive 2010 protests by Thaksin’s supporters, known as red shirts, was met with a military crackdown that left 90 people dead.That's the thing about democracy: the people who win the most votes get power, and the losers have to live with the result. Even in the United States it is difficult to get many people to accept the legitimacy of the opposition, and where democracy is new and the powers of the government unclear, this is often impossible. The lesson of the past 30 years ought to be that democracy is not in itself an answer to the problems that bedevil much of the world. Without mutual respect, without a society used to the ups and downs of democratic politics, without some level of determination to get along, democracy only adds fuel to the fire of old grievances. I hope Thais eventual get used to losing elections and find ways to get along, but I am not optimistic.
Yingluck, elected in 2011 and Thailand’s first female prime minister, was seen by opponents as a proxy for her exiled big brother, and the amnesty bill seemed to fit that narrative. The thing is, after being passed by the lower house, the bill was defeated 141–0 in the Senate last month and the government pledged to drop it.
Unfortunately, rather than continue to fight Yingluck’s agenda from the senate, leaders of the opposition Democrat Party resigned from their offices to lead anti-government protests seeing to overthrow her and replace the country’s current democratic system with a vaguely-defined “People’s Council.”
Several authors have noted that Thailand’s political predicament appears to contradict the longstanding idea in political science that as populations become wealthier and more educated, they will become more democratic. In Thailand, the wealthy, urban middle class are perhaps the least supportive of democracy. It’s not the only place where this seems to be the case.
Stephen Young was walking through the village of Ban Chiang in northeast Thailand in 1966 and tripped on a kapok tree root, fell headlong, and launched one of the major archaeological discoveries of the 20th century. Finding himself on the ground, he noticed a ceramic ring protruding from the soil, which turned out to be the rim of a partially buried clay pot. He then noticed that he was in fact surrounded by these “circles” in the earth. The pots, slowly being exposed by erosion, were buff in color with striking designs in red. Young noticed that the sherds were not glazed, and so must have been very old. A lost ancient culture was being revealed.
Thailand's festival of lights, during which little lighted rafts are launched on the rivers as offerings to the water goddess. Loy Krathong is celebrated every year on the full moon night of the 12th lunar month, which usually falls in November on the western calendar.
The words mean "to float a lotus." The lotus-shaped rafts are traditionally made of banana leaves, decorated with flowers and fruit. These days they are more often made of bread or styrofoam.
This year the government asked people not to so this, so that the rafts would not clog the canals and drains and worsen the already disastrous flooding, but most people ignored them.
In the city of Chang Mai, people also launch lights into the air.
the middle class of many developing nations is very nervous about the voting power of ill-educated peasants. You can see this playing out in Thailand, where a government elected with the support of poor, rural voters was regarded by the urban middle class as a giant theft ring.There are also sectional differences at work, and an obscure conflict within the royal family over the succession to the throne (the current king is old and sick).
The brief invasion of Parliament earlier Wednesday (July 1, 2010), the failure of security forces to stop it and the hasty retreat by government officials added to a growing sense in Bangkok that the government was not in control of the situation.The protesters were later cleared from the city by the army, and more than a hundred were killed. But many people supported the protesters, and the government announced a compromise settlement that led to yesterday's election, conducted on reasonably fair terms. I suspect this means another military coup is unlikely this year; according to the BBC, the army chief of staff has promised to stay neutral.
At a rally shortly after the invasion a protest leader, Jatuporn Prompan, was defiant. “If you want to kill us, come on in,” he said. “But if you consider us your brothers and sisters, put your weapons down.”
“This is a slap in the face to the establishment for what they’ve done since the military coup in 2006,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University. “This is a new Thailand that they must learn to live with.”I have to say that for an outsider it is difficult to figure out the reality behind the charges and counter-charges of Thai politics. I don't doubt that Thaksin is corrupt, since he became a billionaire in highly regulated industries (telecommunications, television, etc.) and must have had government help to get him going. But is he that much more corrupt than the average Thai politician or businessman? His party established universal health care in Thailand, and other measures to help the poor; is this what his opponents mean by buying votes? And was the favoritism his businesses have allegedly received while he was in power much greater than what they got from earlier governments? Amnesty International accused his government of human rights violations stemming from violent suppression of the combination of drug dealers and secessionist ethnic groups that trouble Thailand's borders, but my understanHugo Chavez of Venezuela, but he hasn't tried to rewrite the constitution. It really seems to me that the old Thai elite has tried to crush Thaksin because he threatens their grip on the society; certainly that is what many Thais think:
by far the greatest distrust, and the hardest to overcome, is that felt by a sizeable number of Thais, inside and outside the red shirts, towards the country’s royalist elite and its political, military and business allies. This grouping blithely tossed out Mr Thaksin when he got too big for his boots. That he was thuggish and greedy was a handy excuse. But the 2006 coup failed to bury him politically and only unleashed a wider backlash against an elite that still believes in a divine hierarchy of which they are the agents. Mr Abhisit would object to such a description, but his class betrays little sympathy or interest in the aspirations of rural and working-class voters. Their attitude, says Supavud Saicheua, an economist at Phatra Securities, is: “We are brilliant people. We know what you want."Poor Thais, though, have their own ideas about what they want, and in this election they made them clear.
