Thaksin from a distance

By The Economist | DUBAI

FOR those who pay more attention to English football than Thai politics, Thaksin Shinawatra might be best known as the former owner of Manchester City Football Club. He ran the club for one season, splashed out on new players, then sold it in 2008 to the ruling family in Abu Dhabi—who promptly pumped it full of petrodollars. Their payoff came this past season with an FA Cup victory, the club's first trophy in decades, and third place in the Premier League.

Mr Thaksin, a telecoms tycoon turned politician, is rich. But the sheiks of Abu Dhabi are richer. He jokes that they do not have merely deep pockets, they have many pockets. It certainly takes serious dosh to run a top European club. Mr Thaksin insists that he is no longer in that league, if he ever was. His legal troubles in Thailand have not helped: the country's supreme court last year seized $1.3 billion of his frozen assets.

Now Mr Thaksin has his eye back on a less-than-beautiful game: Thai politics. He is banking on a political party headed by his younger sister to win elections on July 3rd and score another blow to the Thai establishment that tried and failed to bury his career. At his luxury villa in Dubai, Mr Thaksin receives a constant flow of visitors, including your correspondent, who joined him recently for tea and conversation.

Mr Thaksin is upbeat about the election. He predicts that his Pheu Thai party could win 270 out of 500 seats in parliament and form the next government. Opinion polls suggest that no one party will cross the threshold for single-party rule; the winner will have to form a coalition. But it is clear that Pheu Thai poses a stiff challenge to the Democrat Party led by the prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, who was installed with support from the army.

Ever since Mr Abhisit called elections last month, Thais have been speculating as to whether the establishment might pull the plug on the whole process, in order to stop Mr Thaksin's party from taking power. The ultra-nationalist (and anti-Thaksin) yellow shirts have urged a suspension of democracy under a royalist government. Asked by reporters about coup plots, hawkish army generals serve up boilerplate denials—just as they did before ousting Mr Thaksin in 2006.

Mr Thaksin seems untroubled by such chatter. Elections will go ahead, he insists, and cheaters beware. “If you rig the elections, then the people know,” he warns. He wants Pheu Thai to invite smaller parties into a coalition, even if the party's numbers were sufficient to support a single-party government. They would be the “ferns” in a flower arrangement to make it more beautiful, he says.

For Thailand's royalist generals, a victory for Mr Thaksin's allies is a queasy prospect. Their red-shirt supporters have vowed to punish those who ordered and carried out last year's crackdown on their protests. Pheu Thai also wants to amend the current constitution, which was drafted under military rule. If there were any doubt about the ties between the party and the man in Dubai, consider one of its campaign slogans: “Thaksin Thinks, Pheu Thai Acts”.

And that is not all. Pheu Thai has pledged that it would bring Mr Thaksin home. He recently told supporters that he would return in November 2011, and this remains his goal. “When I say something, I mean it,” he said. For now, though, he is a fugitive from Thai justice. He travels on a passport not from Thailand but from Montenegro. A two-year jail term passed in absentia for corruption awaits him in Thailand.

So the party has proposed an amnesty for participants in Thailand's recent political struggle, including, no doubt, their spiritual leader, Mr Thaksin. “If you really want to reconcile, you have to forget the past and look ahead for the future,” he says.

Easier said than done. The former prime minister is loved and loathed by roughly equal proportions of the electorate. Reconciliation is a hard sell in the zero-sum game of Thai politics. Even harder, perhaps, than turning Manchester City into the champions of the Premier League.