Thai vote for authoritarian regime ‘must be respected’

By Max Constant

BANGKOK

Four days after a controversial military-backed constitution was passed in a referendum by a majority of Thai voters, politicians and analysts at odds with the draft have called for the result to be respected.

“A majority of Thai people have traded democracy for peace and stability,” Sirichok Sopha, a former MP of the Democrat Party, said Thursday at an event titled A New Constitution and Now What? organized at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand.

The Democrat Party is long the party of the establishment, and had been seen to be in favor of a 2014 coup -- but came out against the constitution.

“Sadly, the Thai people want an authoritarian government, but their voice must be respected,” added Sopha.

Suranand Vejjajiva, a former MP from the Puea Thai party, the political adversary of the Democrat Party, whose most recent prıme mınıster was overthrown ın the junta’s 2014 coup, said a lot of the “yes” vote derived “from the yearning for stability, although a kind of short-term stability”.

“The culture of democracy is not rooted in Thailand,” he said at the event.

Meanwhile, veteran pro-democracy activist Gothom Arya said that even if the referendum process was flawed, “Thai people voted for the draft charter and we must accept the result.”

On Aug. 7, 61.3 percent of Thai voters supported the draft charter that allows the junta to appoint a 250-member senate with a five-year mandate.

The draft charter also allows the selection of a prime minister who is not an elected parliamentarian, but an “outsider”, for instance a retired bureaucrat or military officer.

A second question at the referendum, asking if the senate should vote jointly with the lower house for the choice of the prime minister, was also approved, albeit by a lower margin of 58 percent.

Before the referendum took place, the junta used all mechanisms at the disposal of the state to promote an approval of the draft charter. Dissenting opinions were repressed and around 20 academic seminars on the draft charter were banned.

“The real intention of those behind the draft and the coming organic laws is that political parties will become smaller, so that none of them has enough seats to choose alone the prime minister, and that, because they will be unable to agree on a name, the door will open for an ‘outsider’,” Vejjajiva said Thursday.

Following the charter’s approval, the constitution drafting committee -- a group of legal experts appointed by the junta -- will now have eight months to write the organic laws, aiming to implement the constitution.

Upon their completion, there will be a three-month period to prepare for elections set to be held in November 2017.

Junta leader-cum-Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said Tuesday that political parties, which had been banned from any political activities since the 2014 coup, will only be free to hold political meetings after the organic laws are enacted.

“Thai people believe there is a set of good people who must lead the country, and who are incorruptible,” said Vejjajiva.

“I don’t believe that. I think these people, however good they are, must be accountable to the population. This constitution has no checks and balance at all,” he added.

By “good people”, Vejjajiva referred to mostly conservative, appointed technocrats and bureaucrats who exerted a hold on power during the 1980s under the premiership of Prem Tinsulanonda, an unelected former army chief.

Arya, meanwhile, underlined that the draft charter is almost impossible to amend under the clauses related to such a process, except if “the military-appointed senate wants to amend it”.