Blowing the whistle

THE truce in the street warfare into which Thai politics descended in 2006-10 is over. To the shrill peeps of ubiquitous whistles, protesters have yet again crowded Bangkok, the capital, brandishing portraits of Bhumibol Adulyadej, Thailand’s long-serving king, revered but frail. What has so far been a peaceful movement earlier this month seemed to threaten the survival of the government of Yingluck Shinawatra, the prime minister. Her tactical retreat has probably saved it. But the political divide looks as unbridgeable as ever, and as dangerous to Thailand’s stability.

The cause of the schism is simple. Thailand’s voters, dominated by the rural poor, keep electing governments loyal to Thaksin Shinawatra, prime minister in 2001-06. Many of the powers-that-be—in the Bangkok elite, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the army and the royal family and court—find this intolerable. They turfed Mr Thaksin out in a coup in 2006. Facing a jail term for corruption if he returns, he runs the country by videoconference from Dubai. In 2007 the electorate stubbornly voted in a government led by his proxies. The opposition managed to find a legal way of getting rid of it and installing a government led by the establishment Democrat Party. Then in 2011 the voters went and did it again, electing Mr Thaksin’s sister, Ms Yingluck.

The truce that followed showed restraint on both sides. The elite seemed at last to grasp that it would have to deal with Mr Thaksin. And Ms Yingluck trod carefully, making friends with the army and doing nothing to threaten entrenched interests—even enforcing Thailand’s scandalously strict lèse-majesté laws as fiercely as ever.

Then, perhaps too confident that they had won the trust of the establishment, the Shinawatras overreached themselves. They pushed a sweeping amnesty bill through the lower house of parliament. It would have scotched thousands of corruption cases, as well as the one at which it was aimed: Mr Thaksin’s conviction. It would also have let off Abhisit Vejjajiva, a former Democrat prime minister, and Suthep Thaugsuban, once his deputy, from the murder charges they face for the use of lethal force against pro-Thaksin “red-shirt” protesters in Bangkok in 2010, when more than 90 died. The army, too, would have been excused for its involvement.

Outrage at the bill brought the establishment onto the streets, some in the yellow shirts they wore in earlier protests (yellow is the royal colour). But, in a remarkable blunder, the bill handed the Democrats the moral high ground and seemed to open up a split between the red shirts and Ms Yingluck’s party, Pheu Thai. In the words of Pavin Chachavalpongpun of Kyoto University, Mr Thaksin appeared to be climbing over dead bodies to come home. Optimists among the Democrats must have glimpsed the end of the long Thaksin ascendancy and their return to the positions of power some see as their birthright.

And they won their point. Ms Yingluck promised not to push the bill through if it was defeated in the Senate, nearly half of whose members are appointed rather than popularly elected. Sure enough, on November 11th all 141 senators present rejected the bill. A ruling the same day by the International Court of Justice in a territorial dispute with Cambodia over the Preah Vihear temple near the border also helped Ms Yingluck. The opposition tried to use this, too, to criticise the government, but the ruling was even-handed and hard to portray as a humiliation.

The Democrats kept the protests going, on the pretext that the amnesty bill is not formally dead—Ms Yingluck has 180 days in which to break her promise and table it again in the lower house. Mr Suthep and eight of his colleagues resigned from parliament to lead the movement. They called a three-day South Asian-style national strike from November 13th, largely unheeded. By then, however, their aims seemed no longer limited to the amnesty. The protest leaders want to bring down the government.

Yet Ms Yingluck’s opponents must know that she would probably win another election. Red shirts may be disgruntled with her government for its failure to amend the constitution or lèse-majesté law, for example, or to bring those responsible for the 2010 killings to justice. But they have nowhere else to go. Mr Thaksin, an ethnic-Chinese billionaire, is an odd leader for a group dominated by non-Chinese Thais from the north-east. But they like the populist economic policies, such as a rice-price support scheme attacked this week by the IMF, which he and his sister have pursued.

Self-fulfilling prophecies of doom

If Mr Thaksin cannot be defeated at the ballot box, nor is the army likely to try another coup. It would need the tacit endorsement of King Bhumibol. Part of the air of desperation in elite ranks reflects the calendar. December 5th will be the king’s 86th birthday. It is an occasion when royal pardons are issued, and one that the king used to mark with a speech. This year, again, he is unlikely to be well enough, reminding his anxious people of his mortality. His probable successor, the crown prince, unlike his father, is feared and reviled, in a legally imposed silence. Yet Mr Thaksin, in the words of a cable in 2005 from the American ambassador to Thailand revealed by WikiLeaks, “long ago invested in crown-prince futures”.

So long have Thais told each other that the king’s death would jeopardise the nation’s stability that they may even have made it likely. Mr Thaksin’s opponents have always portrayed him as a threat to the monarchy, and they have long enjoyed the tacit backing of the palace despite its being supposedly above politics. In fact, like all Thai politicians, Mr Thaksin seems to crave the king’s approval. Nothing would suit him better than a royal pardon. What really alarms his enemies is not that he is a closet republican. It is that he may be close to an accommodation with the palace that would see his clan’s rule entrenched for years.

^{Economist.com/blogs/banyan}