What the Thai army took from Thaksin Shinawatra’s playbook
The junta once criticised the exiled former prime minister’s appeals to Thailand’s rural voters as populism. Now, under pressure to hold elections, it’s turning to the same people – in an effort to be popular
Four years since a junta-led coup brought General Prayuth Chan-ocha to power in Thailand, the military government appears to have found an unlikely role model for some lessons in democracy: exiled former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
With the junta under growing pressure to hold elections – it has promised a vote in February 2019, but has postponed polls on several occasions – it has ramped up spending in controversial development policies that appear tailor-made to appeal to rural voters, the same demographic that once cemented Thaksin’s power base.
Ironically, some of the programmes bear an uncanny resemblance to the schemes rolled out between 2001 and 2006 by Thaksin, who at the time was attacked by Thai elites and the military for populism.
Before he was overthrown in a 2006 coup, Thaksin had focused his development strategy on rural areas, offering low-interest loans and other incentives to stimulate small and medium-sized enterprises in the One Tambon One Product (OTOP) programme, which is still in place today. This made him very popular in the north and northeast to the extent that the parties he supported have won every election since 2001 – despite the tycoon living in self-imposed exile since being sentenced in 2008 to two years in prison for corruption.
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Observers say the junta has borrowed from Thaksin’s playbook with its latest programmes, which appear equally geared towards rural populations.