Thailand Faces A Likely 2021 of Turmoil John Berthelsen

Despite what may be a losing hand, students have changed the perception of the country.

Although Thailand’s youthful protesters say they will be back with the new year underway to continue demands including curbing the powers of the monarchy, engineering a change of government and reforming the country’s education system, it appears increasingly likely that Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha and King Maha Vajiralongkorn will ride out the crisis although not without scars.

Scars indeed. One academic told Asia Sentinel that “in my opinion, 2020 was a losing year for the monarchy. Never before in Thai history has it been criticized, humiliated and ridiculed to this extent. In just less than four years under Rama X (Vajiralongkorn), the monarchy lost the popular loyalty and legitimacy King Rama IX tirelessly built for seven decades.” King Bhumibol Adulyadej never left the country after assuming the throne and promoted personal integrity and frugality despite the opulence of the Thai palaces.

Whether the students win or lose – and they are increasingly likely to see their demands unmet as time wears on – as the academic points out they have in effect changed the country’s view of the monarchy – although the king has had a considerable hand in that himself with his antics and his womanizing, which social media have spread across all levels of society.

“The barriers to discussing the monarchy in the media are beginning to fall away, with royal wealth, power, and republicanism reported in detail,” wrote US-based academic Kevin Hewison in the East Asia Forum, a think tank based at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy.

Prayuth has fared little better than the king, with a March 2019 national election designed to return the country to civil rule that was universally regarded as fixed to keep him in power. Although opposition parties won a plurality of the vote, the military-backed government engineered the continuation of the ruling coalition and the disbandment of the popular, youthful Future Forward Party headed by Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, former vice president of Thai Summit Group, further alienating students.

The government, which won praise for curbing the Covid-19 coronavirus, appeared to have lost control of the situation in December as thousands of migrants who had fled to Myanmar and other countries began streaming back against porous borders. The number of cases has surpassed 7,000, with clusters of infections growing.

The king, who has spent nearly all of his time in Bavaria, has been forced to come home and indulge in a spell of royal activities to shore up his image and perhaps the survivability itself of the institution and as a counterpoint to the student protest. The general acceptability of other members of the royal family has helped the institution, although the semi-public squabbling among Vajiralongkorn’s harem, with Suthida Tidjai, the king’s fourth wife, seeking to retain her precarious position as queen in the middle of an onslaught by members of Vajiralongkorn’s harem, particularly Noble Consort Sineenat, who was temporarily discarded and jailed for putting on airs before she was able to make a comeback and resume her place as the first Royal Concubine in nearly 100 years. Sineenat’s position wasn’t helped by the leaking of hundreds of pictures online, many of them salacious.

The widespread publicity over the king’s antics forced him to tend to the royal knitting for the longest unbroken period since he became king, including making himself available to the general public and even answer questions from reporters and meeting with hundreds of high school students at a camp for royal volunteers to protest his love of the country. He faced additional humiliation as a movement grew in Germany to demand his ouster from the country.

“This flurry of royal activities has been intended to shore up Vajiralongkorn’s image and perhaps the survivability of the institution and as a counterpoint to the student protest,” said a former official who also asked to remain unnamed because of the real prospect of retribution. “The institution has been helped by the general acceptability of other members of the royal family. Prayuth is nowhere near the end of his rope, yet politicians are gearing up for a general election which they hope may take place sometime next year, thinking that he will not serve beyond the end of the year.”

But, he said, whether the student protest will fade out remains to be seen as this is examination season in schools and universities and the students will have to get their act together and solve the problem of the guards. They don’t seem to be discouraged by the lawsuits leveled against them by the government as they feel they don’t have much to lose.

“The monarchy and the military are stronger and very much more in unison than the protesters initially thought,” said Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a former Thai diplomat now in exile. “Given the deeply-rooted entrenchment of their power in politics for several decades, it is also reasonable to think that regime change is not an easy task. But what the protesters have done in the past months has been the dismantling of the reverence of the monarchy. I think this is an achievement and a first step toward regime change.”

The youth-led protest movement got underway on July 18 with the largest street demonstrations since the 2014 coup that ended the democratically elected government headed by Pheu Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra. Drawing as many as 20,000 people a night, the demonstrations have gone on far longer than authorities, using lèse majesté and other laws to intimidate them, expected. The protesters, calling themselves Free Youth, demanded that the House of Representatives be dissolved, that a new Constitution be promulgated to replace the skewed document put in place by the military, and that intimidation of the people end. Although the gathering was planned for a single day, the protests spread across the country to more than 20 of Thailand’s 83 provinces. Although the protesters said the monarchy wasn’t a target, the protests escalated into a demand to curb Vajiralongkorn’s powers.

Those powers are regarded by many as ominous, a return to the medieval sway that generations of Thai monarchs had exercised prior to the 1932 revolution that implemented a civilian rule that in fact masked domination of power by the military. He is believed to have been behind the removal of a plaque commemorating the advent of democracy which had been installed at the Royal Plaza in 1917. In 2019, he ordered the transfer of all US$60 billion of the assets of the huge Crown Property Bureau to his personal name and control, has accrued a personal army outside the control of the military and maintains a deeply feared dungeon at his Thaweewattana palace in Nakorn Pathom province.

Plainly spooked by the magnitude of the protests, a government spokesman told Reuters in December that protesters would be allowed to gather again, although only if they remain peaceful. “We still believe that every different side can still come together to find a solution,” he said.

That is something that appears unlikely. As with youth everywhere, the Thai students have confounded their elders by making extensive use of social media to spread the word and evade government restrictions, organizing what amount to flash rallies before the government could thwart them, using rap music and other entertainment to draw crowds. They have ridiculed the monarchy and embraced LGBTQI members, anathema to conservative Thai society. Older supporters have joined the schoolchildren.

The regime insists that as the protests have worn on, the demonstrators are losing support. So far, about 250 people who have been deemed ringleaders have been arrested and charged. But the protesters have not yet been successful in securing any of their core demands. Police have opened lèse majesté cases against more than two dozen protest figures.

The regime and allied conservatives suggest that nothing has changed and that the demonstrations have lost steam and support. That view ignores the challenges posed over multiple issues. A Credit Suisse report issued in 2020 named Thailand as the most unequal country in the world, with 1 percent of the population owning 66.9 percent of the nation’s wealth. The Thai legal system is heavily criticized as favoring the elite classes, with justice meted out on very different terms for ordinary people. As Asia Sentinel reported in September, the education system is a mess, rated 47th in global school rankings among 76 countries in mathematics and science and well behind most of Thailand’s Southeast Asian contemporaries. It is considered hidebound, authoritarian, stuck in the past, and preoccupied with kowtowing to the monarchy. The government has responded to the protests with harsh disciplinary measures, ordering protesters to be shorn of their hair and otherwise humiliated.

The new generation is showing little fear of the laws despite the arrests. They are different from the Red Shirt protesters of the early part of the last decade, many of whom hailed from the poverty-stricken northeast of the country and who were loyal to Thaksin Shinawatra, the deposed prime minister who first challenged the establishment with social programs for the poor at the start of the century before he was ousted by royalists. 2021 may indeed be eventful but the army and the royalty show little indication that they will engage in substantive dialogue.

This article was published in Asia Sentinel dated 4 January 2021. Republished with permission from Asia Sentinel.