Draft charter built on shaky foundations
Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha is not the only one in town who can get angry. The new draft charter looks set to cause many people to rise up in resentment too, if it is approved in its current form.
The 30-plus charter drafters may have good intentions in trying to come up with rules they believe will produce “clean” politics, but this does not mean their assumptions are not misplaced.
The Charter Drafting Committee’s (CDC) mission statement reads like any decent, glossy brochure. In writing the new charter, the CDC is steered by four principles: to provide more room for citizens in politics, a more effective check-and-balance mechanisms, means to reduce inequality and an institutional framework to achieve reconciliation.
Indeed, CDC chairman Borwornsak Uwanno is so confident in the tenets behind the new draft he hopes it will be the final charter. Thailand has used 19 since 1932.
Many people would not make such a bold statement. The draft charter is not yet finished, nor are proposals for its content finalised. These are the reasons cited by Gen Prayut and other bigwigs when trying to allay criticism of the draft.
Still, even in its half-formed state, the constitutional sketch already has a tilted outline which suggests it has been built on skewed foundations.
It’s one thing for a housing project to have different colour roof tiles than those advertised in its impressive brochure. It’s quite another if an advertisement for a two-storey, brick house turns out to be a one-story bamboo abode.
It’s clear the CDC imagined “clean” politics is an affair in which politicians are kept under strict rules which prevents them having too much power.
The ascendancy of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and the grip on the country’s administration wielded by his network of politicians obviously still haunts those opposed to him.
That is why the CDC is turning the new draft charter into a balancing act: an attempt to foster a structural design that will keep the relatively new, election-derived mandate under constant check by other traditional power groups in society.
The CDC’s preference for an election system known to have produced a weak, coalition government instead of a strong one; a proposal for the Senate to be wholly selected by an elite few; and the provision for a prime minister to be a non-elected outsider all stem from the belief that power from an election can’t be trusted. It must be curbed, controlled and curtailed if it is to be put to good use.
The charter drafters are probably right, but then what power can be fully trusted?
In letting top bureaucrats, military commanders, court presidents or labour union leaders choose who will sit in the Senate, the CDC may believe they are providing the system with a group of guardians who will concentrate on true public interests because they don’t have to care about campaign popularity.
But the drafters will inevitably run into the question of: Who will watch the watchers?
Power, regardless of its source, can’t be trusted. An effective institutional design is one that keeps power accountable.
It is true that one-man, one-vote has not been a perfect way to produce representatives with the best qualities, nor is it most effective in keeping them responsible. But it is far better than having the entire Senate picked by a few power brokers, accountable to no-one but themselves.
There is nothing wrong with charter drafters trying to install checks and balances into a democratic system. It’s worrying, however, if they are turning the highest laws into a rule book on how to keep politicians under the traditional elites’ thumb.
“The world is changing,” Harry Hart, the impeccably attired British spy played by Colin Firth told his working-class recruit in the action comedy Kingsman: The Secret Service. “There is a reason aristocrats developed weak chins,” he said.
The two sentences are not the most congruous, and there have been many readings about what they actually mean.
What the charter drafters should take from them is that no matter what they feel about an election, a poll remains the most equitable channel for ordinary people to attain the power of government.
Campaigning for votes is a tough game and probably not suited to everyone, especially those with a sense of entitlement. But it is the norm for democracy.
In its current form, the draft charter is unlikely to fulfil its goal of forging reconciliation, let alone the much more ambitious dream of being the country’s last.