There were two bombs last Monday. The one in Britain killed at least 22 people and injured 120 as they came out of a concert at Manchester Arena. It was carried out by a suicide bomber named Salman Abedi and claimed by the Islamic State. The other was in Thailand, and injured 22 people at a military-linked hospital in Bangkok; nobody has claimed responsibility yet. But what happened afterward was very different.
In Manchester, they just kept calm and carried on. The Scottish band Simple Minds went ahead with their scheduled concert at Bridgewater Hall in Manchester Tuesday night, and 80 percent of the people who had bought tickets showed up for the show. Lead singer Jim Kerr told the audience they would all have “felt cowardly” if they didn’t play, they had a minute’s silence for the victims, and then they rocked.
The response was similar all over the country. Flags were at half-mast everywhere, and they even temporarily halted the campaigning for the national election due on June 8, but nobody suggested that the election should be canceled. That would be not just be craven; it would be ridiculous.
It was different in Thailand. Nobody died in the Bangkok attack, and the bomb was clearly not intended to kill people. It was timed to mark the third anniversary of the most recent military coup, and the likeliest perpetrators were a sidelined faction in the army (although the authorities will probably blame it on pro-democracy activists).
But the leader of the military junta, Gen. Prayut Chan-o-cha, went completely over the top. When he seized power in 2014, he promised elections in 2015. Using various pretexts, he has pushed them down to 2018, but he is now having second thoughts about the whole idea. “I want everyone to think,” Prayuth said. “If the country is still like this, with bombs, weapons, and conflicts among people … can we hold an election?”
Of course they can hold elections. Why would the occasional bomb stop that? As for “conflicts among people,” those are inevitable in any society, and elections are the way you settle them — at least temporarily — without violence. Prayut is just nervous about holding an election because it might embolden all the supporters of democracy who have been frightened into silence.
He really shouldn’t be nervous because he has rigged the game pretty thoroughly. The new constitution, ratified last month, makes it practically certain that the military will choose every government, even if there are free elections.
The new voting system makes it almost impossible for any single party to win a majority of seats in the lower house of the National Assembly. And the upper house (senate), whose 250 members are directly appointed by the military, will have a leading role in choosing who forms the new government unless there is a single clear winner in the lower house.
Thailand has been trapped in a cycle of civil unrest and military intervention since the first left-wing, populist government was elected in 2001 under the leadership of Thaksin Shinawatra. The elite and the urban middle class were appalled by his diversion of government resources from their interests to those of the rural majority and the urban poor, and they sought military help.
The party, now called Pheu Thai and led by Thaksin’s younger sister, was driven from power again by the 2014 military coup. Now Prayut Chan-o-cha and his fellow generals are trying once again to devise a constitution that would keep the “wrong” people from winning elections. In theory, it looks pretty Thaksin-proof, but Prayut is clearly getting cold feet about testing it in practice.
The problem is that if the pro-Thaksin voters are disciplined enough — and they probably are — then they could beat the new voting system by splitting into several parties, but running only one of them in each constituency that they have a chance of winning. Then reunite those parties in a coalition when the National Assembly meets, and you have an instant majority government and no call for intervention by the military-run senate.
Last Monday’s bomb in Bangkok may indicate increasing divisions in the army. Even some of the soldiers must be having doubts about the military’s ability to keep permanent control of the country’s politics, and also about the autocratic ways of the new — and widely unpopular — king. The next turn in the long saga of Thailand’s quest for a genuine democracy may not be far off.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.