Reconciliation Games A panel discussion on Thai politics with Chris Baker and Thitinan Pongsudhirak

Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand. Bangkok. August 9, 2012. Since last year's overwhelming election victory of Thaksin Shinawatra's Pheu Thai party, and with his sister installed as prime minister, and Thaksin himself running the government from his self-imposed exile in Dubai (he's a convicted felon who has fled the country to avoid his prison sentence), things have been calm in Thailand. The opposition Democratic Party is in disarray and weak, and politics is in a holding pattern. So, what will happen next?

Academics Chris Baker and Thitinan Pongsudhirak are two of Thailand's keenest political observers and both are able to go below the surface of daily news reporting to provide insight into the forces at play. What both of them made clear at the FCCT on August 9, is that Thai society and politics will never be the same, and that those who expect things to "return to normal" will be disappointed. Instead, the country is faced with a permanent realignment of society in which the age of deference is over, the power of elections has been tasted by the rural and poor classes, and where a higher level of education has been achieved and people have moved out of the villages to towns and then to large cities like Bangkok. The army has no taste for another coup.

Because of these divides in Thai society, with the middle class on the rise and believing itself to be a part of a larger Asian middle class in ascendency, no reconciliation is possible given the current alignment of Thaksin and his supporters against the middle class and royalists. But, according to Baker, eventually there will be a realignment of political forces, which will then be in a position to "make a deal" which the current opposing segments cannot do. When and what form this realignment will take is a matter of intriguing speculation, but for the present time, there is a truce without reconciliation. The biggest threat to the hegemony of the Thaiksin forces, is that the Pheu Thai party will not deliver on the promises it has made, which will cause a schism in the party, with the radical red shirt elements splitting off. Baker does not see renewed street violence as an inevitable consequence. Thitinan does not think that Thaksin will come back to live in Thailand.