Thailand’s political crisis is a sorry tale of bad losers and a broken political system. But it is also an old-fashioned, 20th-century-style class war. Above all, it concerns one of the great dilemmas of democracies: what to do about unacceptable politicians who, for all their obvious iniquities, are elected fair and square. Which is to say that it is the story of Thaksin Shinawatra.

Thaksin became prime minister in 2001, after making a billion in telecoms, and early on distinguished himself with the kind of policies that could have been designed to alienate Western governments and liberal public opinion. In southern Thailand, he launched a brutal campaign against Islamic insurgents which left scores of innocent people dead. In his version of the war on drugs, the police were permitted to shoot anyone whom they suspected of being a dealer. He bullied his critics in the media, and deployed his wealth to political and personal advantage. (In 2008, in a verdict that may or may not have been political in nature, he and his wife were convicted in absentia of a multi-million-pound property cheat.) He was cheerfully unabashed about diverting government largess towards regions that voted for him, and depriving those that didn’t. ‘Democracy is a good and beautiful thing,’ he once said, ‘but it’s not the ultimate goal as far as administering the country is concerned. Democracy is just a tool … The goal is to give people a good lifestyle, happiness and national progress.’
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After the coup, which shooed Thaksin off into exile in Dubai, the generals convened an assembly of tame delegates who rewrote the country’s constitution to give the Democrats a better chance of winning. An election was held, but Abhisit lost again, to a party of self-declared Thaksin supporters. The Yellow Shirts responded with a new campaign of mass protest and disruption, occupying the prime minister’s office and then Bangkok’s international airport. Soon Thaksin’s proxy prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, was forced out of office for the crime of having appeared on a cookery programme, in violation of new rules about politicians having two jobs (in an earlier incarnation, he had been a well-known TV chef). After a few months of confusion and more court rulings in his favour, Abhisit, with Korn as his finance minister, ended up in power – without the bother of having to win an election. Thaksin’s Red Shirt supporters mounted huge demonstrations of their own, which were suppressed by the army with the loss of 91 lives. But, inescapably, the moment came for Abhisit’s Democrats to do what they have always done least well, and fight an election. In 2011, they lost again, to Thaksin’s sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, a businesswoman with no political experience.
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In 2006 the generals got in, wrote their new constitution within a year, and got smartly out. The National Council for Peace and Order, as the junta calls itself this time around, speaks of a vague ‘roadmap’, including a three-month cooling-off period and the drawing up of another new constitution, leading back eventually to ‘full democracy’ in 15 months or so. By shutting down the protests, the coup has improved traffic in Bangkok, and may eventually calm investors and tourists (the economy shrank by 2.1 per cent in the first quarter of the year). But it is impossible to see how it will do anything but aggravate Thailand’s long-term problems, which derive from the inability of a minority, and an entrenched political establishment, to accept the will of the majority.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n12/richard-lloydparry/the-story-of-thaksin-shinawatra