Thai polls mess pits ex-PM against generals

Bloomberg

Thailand’s first election since the 2014 coup was always going to be messy. But it’s turning out to be even more chaotic than many observers expected, setting the stage for renewed tumult after five years of military rule.
Election authorities have faced calls to resign for repeatedly delaying the full results and failing to account for mounting irregularities, including one candidate whose vote totals dropped 80 percent at one point during the count. After the Election Commission finally released some seat totals, it issued a correction about an hour later. It plans to release the vote count on Friday.
Based on the limited information available, allies of exiled tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra were set to win the most seats, followed by the military-backed Palang Pracharath party. Now both of them are racing to win over allies to form a majority in the 500-member lower house of parliament.
The deck is stacked in favour of the military: It appoints a 250-strong Senate that can also pick a prime minister, likely to be current junta chief Prayuth Chan-Ocha. In theory that means he only needs 126 seats to take power.
But Prayuth has a problem as well. If he takes power without a lower-house majority, Thaksin’s allies could hold a no-confidence vote and boot him out. Then comes another election, or possibly yet another coup — a now routine event that constantly weighs on Southeast Asia’s second-biggest economy.
“If the military can come to terms with the fact that despite all of their efforts they still can’t win, or if there’s a clear resistance, maybe they would stop,” said David Streckfuss, a scholar of Southeast Asian politics and honorary fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But I don’t have much hope for that.”
For the military, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. After Prayuth in 2014 deposed a government led by Yingluck Shinawatra, Thaksin’s sister, the ruling junta wrote a new constitution that was designed to finally break the former premier’s lock on Thailand’s electorate.
The army even emulated Thaksin’s populism, which endeared him over the years to poorer Thais — particularly in the north and northeast — who still laud his policies of cheap healthcare and guaranteed crop prices.
The military’s party proposed lower taxes, a minimum wage increase of more than 30 percent, and price support for rubber, rice, and sugar cane —in addition to continuing a $54 billion infrastructure programme.
Pheu Thai’s policies are similar: It plans to lower taxes, provide debt relief and increase state intervention in farm production to help low-income earners and farmers, the majority of their support base.
Major differences include cutting the defense budget by about 10 percent, and reviewing key junta infrastructure projects like a $5.2 billion high-speed rail deal with China and plans to develop industrial sites on the east coast.