Saving the Senate
The 250-member Senate’s five-year term will end on May 10. Hand-picked by the junta, when it was known as the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), and appointed by HM the King in accordance with Section 113 of the Constitution, it is little surprise the Senate will be remembered as the legacy of the former military government led by Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha.
One of the acts of the Senate will go down in history for the role it played last year after the May 14 election.
Those polls saw the Move Forward Party (MFP) win the most seats in the lower House in denying Pita Limjaroenrat, then the party’s leader, the rightful claim to the premiership, thanks to Section 272 of the Constitution which gave senators the power to select the prime minister as did the elected legislators. Hence the premiership was subsequently handed to Srettha Thavisin of the Pheu Thai Party.
On Tuesday, the cabinet approved the timeline for the election of a new set of 200 senators and an additional budget of 227 million baht, in addition to the 1.19 billion baht awarded by the current fiscal budget. The budget is indeed mind-boggling and the first of its kind in Thailand’s political history.
Designed by the Election Commission (EC), the election — which is to be staged on three levels, district, provincial and national — is not open to the electorate, but is limited to the candidates for Senate seats. Simply put, the candidates will vote for the would be-senators among themselves.
Many rules and restrictions have been imposed by the EC — for example, candidates must not be government officials and must represent one of the 20 professional groups.
Members of political parties, former MPs or senators can enter the election only if they have left their posts for more than five years. The EC has also issued a stern warning that anyone who is fully aware that they are not eligible to apply as a candidate for the election but does so anyway may face jail terms ranging from 1-10 years and a fine from 20,000 to 200,000 baht plus the possibility of being banned from election voting for 20 years if convicted.
The EC may have a good intention for introducing such a weird, unprecedented and complicated electoral system to ensure the 200 new senators will truly serve the public interest and remain free from political bias.
The “voting among senatorial candidates” electoral system appears to have a big loophole that allows political parties or groups to interfere in the polls in order to have their men sit in the Senate.
The trick is to send many eligible candidates, probably with the lure of monetary rewards similar to vote buying, not to contest the election but to vote for their nominees.
The 2,500-baht candidacy application fee is peanuts. More money will be required to “buy” votes among the candidates for the three rounds of the election. But for those who want to have some of the senators in their pockets for their vested political interests, the spending will be worthwhile.
How the EC would cope with this potential scenario is not known. Hopefully, it has safeguards in place or can quickly come up with measures to deal with the problem as the candidacy registration is less than three weeks away.
Otherwise, we will end up with the same old senators representing the same old groups of vested interest groups instead of representing the general public.