Tom Pepinsky

Category: Asia

  • WTF Just Happened in Thailand?

    Thai politics was shaken to its very core yesterday with the announcement that King Vajiralongkorn‘s elder sister Ubolratana will run for Prime Minister in the upcoming Thai general elections. At first glance, the reaction is simple: monarchy should never run for office, and this announcement would appear to be bad news for Thai democracy. But the politics here are much more interesting, much more contentious, and much more momentous for Thailand’s future.

    To see how, we need to understand the current state of affairs of Thai politics (not a democracy), the role of the monarchy in Thai politics (utterly politicized), and the partisan implications of her announcement (upending the status quo).

    The State of Thai Politics

    Thailand is a dictatorship run by a military junta. This is not up for debate: Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha is a general who staged a coup in 2014 and remains the head of the National Council for Peace and Order, which is what the junta terms itself. The coup took place against the caretaker government of Yingluck Shinawatra, whose party Pheu Thai represented the continuation of the political formation constructed by her elder brother, former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, in the early 2000s. Thaksin was himself ousted in an earlier military coup in 2006. The group associated with Thaksin were colorfully known as the “red shirts” in the late 2000s.

    The junta has pledged to restore democracy by holding new elections this year. The problem—from the junta’s perspective—is that holding truly free and fair elections risks electing just the next successor to Thaksin’s political movement. The “yellow shirts,” who opposed Thaksin and wear yellow because it was associated with the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, form a significant political force that give the junta some legitimacy. Almost five years ago I wrote about exactly the same problem when thinking through the 2014 political crisis.

    The Monarchy in Thai Politics

    Unlike monarchies in the UK or Denmark, the Thai monarchy has been utterly politicized. Thailand is formally a constitutional monarchy, and the monarch’s role is supposed to be primarily ceremonial, but this has not been true for decades. Duncan McCargo coined the term network monarchy to describe the complex interactions between the monarchy and its proxies, subordinates, and allies in the Thai political establishment. The absolute monarchy did end in 1932, but most observers of Thai politics agree that in the past half century, conservative and establishment forces have rehabilitated the monarchy—in particular through the person of the late King.

    For a good illustration of how the Thai monarchy is everywhere, watch this short YouTube video, entitled “why is he everywhere?” Lèse-majesté is a serious criminal offense in Thai politics. This was bad enough when the late King was alive, but his successor Vajiralongkorn is not nearly as popular as his father was. His older sister, however, is rather popular.

    The Partisan Implications

    With that background, we are now ready to confront the third piece of the puzzle. The details are always messy in Thai politics, but to a first approximation, it works like this: the junta sees itself as a defender of the monarchy. Thaksin, his followers, and his movement are widely alleged to be anti-monarchical. So one argument for defending the undemocratic status quo is that it defends the monarchy. And how could you be against the monarchy? It’s literally illegal to criticize it.

    Thaksin and the political movement that follows him, for their part, would reject any allegation that they are anti-monarchical. But that is how the politics breaks down. Again, there are details and exceptions, but this is basically it.

    So we have an unpopular King and a military junta overseeing a return to elections in ways that ensure that the opposition will not have a good chance to win. And now the bombshell: Ubolratana has entered the race as a candidate for Prime Minister from the party associated with Thaksin’s movement. This is much more momentous than, say, Prince Harry running for office. The Thai monarchy has always been political, if you believe what I’ve written above, but now it is also divided, between a more popular royal associated with groups alleged to be critical of the monarchy and a less popular monarch associated with the undemocratic establishment.

    So What’s Next

    It’s a waiting game right now. We won’t know. But already in the past twelve hours we have seen some discussions of the implications, and they are (simply put) bananas.

    Here’s one: how can you campaign against Ubolratana if lèse-majesté is illegal?

    Here’s another: can a candidate who is not a Member of Parliament run for Prime Minister?

    Here’s yet another: could Ubolratana’s entry into politics actually prove more stabilizing in the medium term? Will the successors of the red shirts rally behind her?

    There are bound to be more, so watch this space.

  • Elite Maneuvering, the Uighur Crisis, and Indonesian Politics

    Aaron Connelly recently tweeted about a sudden increase in attention to the Uighur crisis in Indonesia.

    The thread is worth reading in full, as it details the challenges that the current government’s predicaments in criticizing the Chinese government, and explains why Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim mass organization, has remained silent on the issue. The predicament comes from the fact that China supplies massive amounts of infrastructure investment that Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo needs, the fact that Indonesia has its own restive region which gives it a strong incentive to support non-interference in the domestic affairs of other countries, and because ethnic Chinese Indonesians are a vulnerable population whose membership in the Indonesian political community has long been questioned. NU’s silence on the Uighur issue is plausibly linked to an explicit Chinese campaign to win over Indonesia’s Muslim elites, and Jokowi’s running mate for the upcoming elections is an NU elite. These facts constrain Jokowi’s options in responding to developments in Xinjiang.

    But Indonesia’s opposition is not so constrained. And here we have dilemma that’s inherent to democratic politics. Indonesia’s opposition is democratic, but large portions of it, including the frontrunner Prabowo Subianto, are illiberal (and even this is being generous). It is entirely reasonable for an opposition to lambast the country’s non-interference principle in the context of an incipient genocide (which is what the Uighur campaign is), but doing so empowers politicians who intentions are anything but liberal, tolerant, or inclusive. Indeed, we know from the Ahok affair that the opposition is keen to exploit anti-Chinese and anti-Christian sentiments for political gain.

    As if on cue, here is a tweet from shortly after Connelly’s thread from the Prosperous Justice Party’s (PKS’s) parliamentary fraction—PKS is an Islamist party that is part of the opposition and that supports Prabowo’s 2019 presidential campaign.

    It says Indonesia must be serious in responding to the plight (or fate) of the Muslim Uighurs. This is a reasonable argument, and a liberal citizen concerned with global justice and human rights would have every reason to support it. But any elite endorsement of anti-Chinese mass opinion will inevitably rebound to affect the country’s Chinese minority, and we should have no illusions that a muscular campaign platform defending the Uighurs’ plight from Prabowo or PKS would actually affect their relations with China, or spill over positively to shape the state of affairs in Papua.

    But Connelly is entirely right that Indonesia’s opposition has the ability to make the Uighur crisis a political issue, one that shapes and is shaped by mass public opinion. We don’t know how that will play out in Indonesia, because no other Muslim democracy has confronted the Uighur crisis as an issue of mass politics. But we are about to see.