Seth Mydans had an informative story in yesterday’s IHT; it’s about the current state of democracy under Thailand’s caretaker prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Key passage:
Sounding desperate, Thailand’s harried leader, Thaksin Shinawatra, wrote to President George W. Bush last spring with what sounded like an SOS. Thai democracy, he said, is under threat.
“Key democratic institutions, such as elections and the observance of constitutional limitations on government, have been repeatedly undermined,” he wrote in a letter published in the Thai press.
Thaksin had been forced by public pressure to give up his office in April, he explained, but was staying on as what he calls a caretaker prime minister.
Bush sent a friendly but noncommittal, and possibly nonplussed, reply.
Since then, things have only gotten worse for Thaksin as court rulings go against him, allies desert, his party faces a possible ban in court, and an election scheduled for October that he could see as his lifesaver appears about to recede farther into the future.
Critics have now accused him of fabricating the assassination attempt against him that was reported Thursday.
Some say this is the endgame in a campaign against him that has included huge street demonstrations and an opposition boycott - and the subsequent annulment in court - of an election that Thaksin won handily in April.
The underlying question is this: Who is threatening democracy and undermining constitutional limitations on government - the people who have taken to the streets and turned their backs on a election, or Thaksin himself?
His critics say that Thaksin has so eviscerated democratic institutions and processes in his five years in power that they had no other means of opposing him or protecting the Constitution.
(Emphasis mine.)
I’m reminded of the mess in Bolivia a few years back (I speak only indirectly of Evo “Cosby sweaters” Morales; I’m thinking more along the lines of the problems surrounding his predecessor’s predecessor, President Sánchez de Lozada).
A democracy is not a democracy, so the argument goes, if a president is forced out due to massive protests — that is, legitimate means must be used to remove an unwanted leader from power. On the other hand, as Thaksin’s opponents suggest, if the prime minister has so subverted the nation’s democratic institutions that he cannot be legally toppled, then taking to the streets is the only viable option.
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