Cantankerous, crude and stubborn: Thailand's Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej has been called many things by his critics. Now the 73-year-old veteran politician is trying to make a name for himself as a vigorous defender of Thailand's flawed -- and increasingly fragile -- democracy by proposing a referendum on whether he should stay in office.
Mr. Samak's surprise maneuver on Thursday followed a week of protests in which tens of thousands of antigovernment demonstrators have occupied the premier's office complex, sparking fears about the economic impact on this global tourism hub and major production platform for companies such as Ford Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Co.
Violent clashes between protesters and government supporters on Tuesday left one person dead and dozens badly injured and prompted Mr. Samak to declare a state of emergency in the hope that the army could resolve the crisis.
It didn't.
Instead, Mr. Samak's problems worsened when army chief Gen. Anupong Paochinda, the man charged with enforcing the emergency decree, said he would not take sides in the confrontation to defend Thailand's democratically elected government, leaving Mr. Samak increasingly isolated.
Late Thursday, local media reported that police said gunmen opened fire on a group of students protesting against Mr. Samak, injuring two.
Earlier Thursday, it was Mr. Samak's turn to try to outflank his opponents by calling for a national referendum on whether his government should remain in charge of Thailand.
'I won't resign. I have to stay on to protect the democratic system,' Mr. Samak said in a morning radio broadcast. He referred to his opponents, who want to end Thailand's democratic government and replace it with a parliament largely appointed by the military and other groups, as a dangerous doomsday cult.
He didn't say when the vote would be held, but urged Thailand's Senate to quickly pass a measure enabling the referendum to go ahead, although it isn't certain the Senate would agree to do so.
'The government knows it can win a referendum and it enables him to claim the constitutional high ground,' said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political science professor at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University. 'But it won't stop the protests. The demonstrators will claim that the whole system is flawed.'
In many ways, Thailand is seeing a series of confusing role reversals that reflect the profound impact of former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, a politically savvy billionaire who was ousted in a military coup in 2006 after five years in office and is now in Britain to avoid criminal corruption charges.
Some of the same protesters who campaigned against military rule and for democracy in the 1970s and again in the 1990s are now taking to the streets to uproot Thailand's democratic system. They argue that unscrupulous politicians are gaming the system with populist policies pioneered by Mr. Thaksin that offer cheap health care and easier access to credit to the country's relatively poor majority of voters. And they essentially want a new system that would end one-man, one-vote democracy and replace with a legislature that would be partly elected and partly appointed by traditional ruling elites drawn from the military, the civil service and other institutions.
The army, which has brutally suppressed pro-democracy street protests in the past, is refusing to act against the government's critics.
Meanwhile, investors who once made Thailand one of the world's fastest-growing economies are giving it a wide berth. In a recent research report, Credit Suisse Group described the country as 'at risk of becoming ungovernable.'
Perhaps most unexpectedly, Mr. Samak, a vocal right-winger himself who once urged the conservative mobs to attack student protesters, resulting in scores of deaths, is reinventing himself as a guardian of democracy.
Since becoming prime minister in January, he has been given mixed reviews by Thais and investors. Financial markets applauded his economic-policy team, which pledged to revive Mr. Thaksin's easy-spending populist policies in order to help Thailand's economy expand through a period of slowing global growth. Tensions between civilian leaders and the armed forces also initially lessened, thanks in part to Mr. Samak's strong ties to Thailand's armed forces and its powerful royal family.
But after Mr. Samak announced plans to change Thailand's constitution to make it harder for the courts to disband political parties for voting fraud, the demonstrators who had campaigned against Mr. Thaksin began massing against Mr. Samak, too. The protesters have portrayed Mr. Samak as a proxy for Mr. Thaksin and his populist politics.
Led by media mogul Sondhi Limthongkul, the People's Alliance for Democracy argued that Thailand's Western-style parliamentary system with direct elections was susceptible to vote-buying and manipulation.
Mr. Samak then began lashing out at Thailand's media, responding to one female reporter's question by demanding to know who she had been sleeping with the night before. His weekly radio show, called 'Speaking Samak Style,' also became increasingly argumentative.
Since May, when the protests began, Thai stock prices have fallen 24% as investors realized that the fundamental problem afflicting Thailand -- the question of whether it can function as a democracy -- hadn't been resolved by the election of Mr. Samak.
Now, struggling to stay in office, Mr. Samak's referendum plan appears to be one of his last remaining gambits. 'I'm doing this for the country, not myself,' he said Thursday. |
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