SHINAWATRAS ON THE WANE
If Mr Thaksin had been judged guilty under Thailand’s Article 112, which prohibits criticism of the monarchy, he could have received a jail sentence of up to 15 years, in a possible coup de grace for the Shinawatra brand, whose influence is considerably weaker than it once was.
The verdict was thus only the latest in a checkered record for the billionaire who lost his prime ministership in a coup d’etat in 2006 by the country’s powerful military. His sister Yingluck Shinawatra, who was elected in 2011 as Thailand’s first female prime minister, was ousted in 2014.
The lese majeste charge stems from an interview he gave to a South Korean newspaper 10 years ago, in which he said he believed the 2014 coup d’etat that had deposed the elected government of his sister had been instigated by “some people in the palace” and members of the privy council, the King’s 19-member advisory body.
The court on Friday ruled that the evidence was insufficient to prove that Mr Thaksin’s statements amounted to defamation or insult of the monarchy.
According to reports, the conviction rate for lese majeste cases is around 80 per cent. Anyone can file a lese majeste complaint, and police are bound by law to investigate; rights groups say the law has been increasingly used as a tool to stifle dissent against the status quo.
A year ago, in August 2024, Thailand’s powerful Constitutional Court ordered the dissolution of the reformist Move Forward Party which had among other things called for amendments to the law, and won the most seats and votes in the 2023 election but was blocked from forming a government.
A Jun 19-25 poll by NIDA (National Institute of Development Administration), one of Thailand’s more trusted agencies, showed that support for Mr Thaksin’s Pheu Thai Party has plunged to 11.52 per cent from 28.05 per cent. Ms Paetongtarn’s personal approval has also fallen to 9.2 per cent from 30.9 per cent in the first quarter. In contrast, the opposition People’s Party and smaller coalition partners gained ground.
The end of the Shinawatra brand would conceivably open up more space for other potentially more popular politicians and parties to sweep to power in elections in a repeat of a cycle that has dogged Thailand ever since Mr Thaksin himself won an election in a landslide in 2001.
That Mr Thaksin was acquitted thus extends the life of the current dispensation which analysts have likened to an elite “grand bargain” in which the former prime minister, whose one-immense popularity was seen as a challenge to the royalist establishment, about faced to join forces with it, thus becoming an ally of rather than a challenge to Thailand’s royalist elites.
Pavin Chachavalpongpun, professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Japan’s Kyoto University, told me the acquittal appears to be “the final confirmation of a discreet political arrangement”.
Since Mr Thaksin’s return in 2023 from 15 years of self-exile, shortly after Pheu Thai joined with several others to form a coalition government after many weeks of political deadlock, he has been careful to display his loyalty to the monarchy, signalling capitulation to the royalists who once threw him out of power. At court on Friday, he wore a yellow tie; yellow is the official colour of Thailand’s monarchy.
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