Bangkok bomb signals turn in democracy fight

There were two bombs on Monday. The one in Britain killed at least 22 people and injured 120 as they came out of a concert at Manchester Arena. It was carried out by a suicide bomber and claimed by ISIS. The other was in Thailand, and injured 22 people at a military-linked hospital in Bangkok; nobody has claimed responsibility.

What happened afterward was very different.

In Manchester, they kept calm and carried on. The Scottish band Simple Minds went ahead with their scheduled concert at Bridgewater Hall in Manchester Tuesday night, and 80 per cent of ticket holders showed up. Lead singer Jim Kerr told the audience they would all have “felt cowardly” if they didn’t play.

The response was similar all over the country. Flags were at half-mast everywhere, and they temporarily halted campaigning for the national election due on June 8, but nobody suggested the election should be cancelled.

It was different in Thailand. Nobody died in the Bangkok attack, which clearly was not intended to kill people. It was timed to mark the third anniversary of the most recent military coup, and the likeliest perpetrators are a sidelined faction in the army.

When he seized power in 2014, the leader of the military junta, Gen. Prayut Chan-o-cha, promised elections in 2015. Using various pretexts, he pushed them off to 2018, but now is having second thoughts. “If the country is still like this, with bombs, weapons, and conflicts among people,” Prayuth said, “can we hold an election?”

Prayut is nervous an election might embolden the supporters of democracy who have been frightened into silence, even though he has rigged the game pretty thoroughly. The new constitution, ratified last month, makes it practically certain the military will choose every government even if there are free elections.

The new voting system makes it almost impossible for any single party to win a majority of seats in the lower house of the National Assembly. And the upper house (Senate), all of whose 250 members are directly appointed by the military, will have a leading role in choosing who forms the new government unless there is a single clear winner in the lower house.

Thailand has been trapped in a cycle of civil unrest and military intervention since the first left-wing, populist government was elected in 2001 under the leadership of Thaksin Shinawatra. The elite and the urban middle class were appalled by his diversion of government resources from their own interests to those of the rural majority and the urban poor, and they sought military help.

The first military coup came in 2006, but when the soldiers tried to legitimize the government by holding elections under a new militarywritten constitution, Thaksin’s party won again.

The party, now called Pheu Thai and led by Thaksin’s younger sister, was driven from power again by the military coup of 2014.

If the pro-Thaksin voters are disciplined enough — and they probably are — they could beat the new voting system by splitting into several parties, but running only one in each constituency, then reunite those parties in the National Assembly.

Monday’s bomb in Bangkok may indicate increasing divisions in the army. Even some of the soldiers must be having doubts about the military’s ability to keep permanent control of the country’s politics, and also about the autocratic ways of the new (and widely unpopular) king. The next turn in the long saga of Thailand’s quest for a genuine democracy may not be far off.