Why Mr. Samak Must Go

Posted September 5, 2008

Thailand’s media-bashing, brash, stubborn, and quirky Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej passed up an opportunity to resign Thursday morning in a speech to the nation that some had predicted would become his swan song. Instead, the embattled premier, despite reeling from the previous day’s resignation of highly respected Foreign Minister Tej Bunnag, and from Army chief Anupong Paochinda’s open refusal to use force against street demonstrators, vowed to remain in power indefinitely to “protect democracy.” But in fact, only Mr. Samak’s departure can pave the way for resumption of the remarkable progress in democratic deepening Thailand achieved in the 1990s—progress brought decisively to a halt under the premiership of populist Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra after his ascendancy to power in February 2001.

Thailand’s current crisis is not, as some analysts have suggested, structurally insoluble. Premier Samak’s irascible personality is itself the key factor now standing in the way of a solution. Even a Thaksin/Samak associate from the ruling People’s Power Party (PPP) would be an acceptable replacement in the minds of many members (and certainly supporters) of the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD). Just so long as the new premier would have a less combative style than either Mr. Samak or Mr. Thaksin, and just so long as he or she possessed more of the subtle skills necessary to govern in a semi-modernized, pluralistic society, almost any of the conceivable candidates would be acceptable at this point. But the new premier would also have to show signs of embracing a worldview that conceives of democracy not cynically as a tool for amassing power but as a valued end in itself, and as a process that requires patient cultivation and perfection over a long period of time.

Mr. Samak, long a leading figure of the violent right in Thai politics, is entirely incapable of playing such a role. His claim that he must stay in office to safeguard democracy is based solely on the fact that his party and its coalition partners were elected to their majority position in the House of Representatives last December. Resigning now to appease protesting mobs, he contends, would violate the principle of majority rule. Mr. Samak and his defenders do rightly note that some of the leading figures in the PAD have consistently called in recent months for replacing the current democratic system in which the House is constituted by popular elections with a new system of guided democracy that would include a mix of popular elections, elections through functional constituencies, and appointments by authoritarian elites. These PAD proposals would undoubtedly damage Thai democracy, and Mr. Samak and his supporters can cleverly point to them as good reasons for him to stay in office even though he himself is certainly no democrat in spirit, or even often in practice.

Why does the PAD view electoral democracy with suspicion? The answer is the widely-remarked cleavage between largely liberal and cosmopolitan Bangkok (plus points farther south) and the poorer and less-educated communities of the North and Northeast. Outside Bangkok and the South, corrupt politicians running entrenched machines are more likely to buy votes from people with not much else to sell. Poor people selling votes also seem culturally to prefer authoritarian, tough-guy prime ministers who assert commitments to leveling the socioeconomic playing field through populist policies such as subsidized health care and cheap (but fiscally-irresponsible) loans. The poor far prefer such tough-guy populists to the lawyerly policy-wonk types of the Democrat Party, who, in the eyes of many northerners and northeasterners, blow a lot of hot air about human rights and clean elections and rooting out corruption and the like, but fail to demonstrate how these intangibles would bring material benefits to their communities.

For all of these reasons, key PAD leaders contend, Thailand’s upcountry poor will always routinely vote into office the corrupt machine politicians allied with Mr. Thaksin and now Mr. Samak. These voters will also pose little or no objection when the Thaksins and the Samaks proceed to gut the power of the independent commissions first established in the 1997 “People’s Constitution” and in other ways undermine the checks-and-balances mechanisms central to the successful functioning of any democracy. In short, the PAD leaders argue, given Thailand’s distinctive socioeconomic and cultural structure, electoral democracy can paradoxically lead only to democracy’s self-destruction in Thailand, divided as it is by such severe inequalities.

Mr. Samak understands these points perfectly well. He is being disingenuous when he asserts that merely the fact of his being elected makes him the protector of democracy. He is also being disingenuous in a much more direct way: In July, he embarked upon a campaign to revise the 2007 Constitution for the purpose of weakening or entirely gutting the independent commissions and removing the clauses that prescribe extremely tough penalties for election-tampering and corruption. Just earlier this week, the Election Commission recommended to the Constitutional Court that Mr. Samak’s PPP be disbanded for election-tampering, as Mr. Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai party had been disbanded in 2007. The courts have been much more willing to take an aggressive approach toward dirty politics ever since being instructed to do so by King Bhumipol during a crucial royal conclave with senior jurists in April 2006. Mr. Samak claims he is trying to protect democracy by staying in office, but his efforts to revise the constitution indicate clearly that he is instead trying to undermine it. Moreover, he is pursuing this course of action in the face of widespread and profoundly deep public opposition.

The new activism of the courts and independent commissions is one reason to be optimistic about prospects for Thailand resuming the process of democratic deepening pursued so successfully in the 1990s. Once Mr. Samak is gone, even assuming the PPP (or, if disbanded, its successor) is returned to office following new elections, the next prime minister will almost certainly be someone with a significantly more diplomatic and politically-gifted personality than the crude Mr. Samak or the egotistical Mr. Thaksin. Mr. Thaksin chose Mr. Samak as his proxy; but neither man is likely to be able to choose Thailand’s next prime minister. Once a more sensible and public-spirited prime minister assumes office, no matter from which party, the PAD’s more radical leaders will have little choice but to work with the new leader since there is actually very little support in Thailand for abandoning electoral democracy. Moreover, it appears that key PAD leaders understand this point perfectly well. Even if a small number of radical holdouts were to insist on continuing protests, so long as the new prime minister is a wiser and more modest figure than Messr. Samak and Thaksin—and she or he could hardly fail to be—the protestors would rapidly dissolve into an insignificant political force.

Public-opinion polls consistently show that the vast majority of Thai people want democracy for their country and that they identify with the larger community of democratic states in international society. Thailand-wide, but most notably in Bangkok, people recognize the serious flaws in Thai democracy. In response, since the 1990s, groups and individuals in an activated civil society have devoted enormous energies nationwide to debating, mobilizing, protesting, and in other ways demonstrating their care and concern to improve their political system. Things went badly astray under Mr. Thaksin, but arguably he was an aberration, as was the military coup of September 2006 that proved unavoidably necessary to stop the billionaire tycoon’s efforts to consolidate a new populist authoritarianism. Recovering from those years and resuming the positive course of the 1990s will take time, patience, and compromise. With Mr. Thaksin now forced to seek asylum in England, the next important step in putting Thailand back on track will be Mr. Samak’s resignation. And then there will be many important steps to follow.

Mr. Lynch, associate professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, is the author of “Rising China and Asian Democratization: Socialization to Global Culture in the Political Transformations of Thailand, China, and Taiwan” (Stanford University Press, 2008).