For the last couple of months, the Thai capital Bangkok has witnessed recurrent street demonstrations by the so-called People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC) designed to topple the elected Pheu Thai government led by Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra. Not satisfied with Yingluck’s decision to dissolve parliament and call early elections for 2 February, the PDRC’s leader, former Deputy PM Suthep Thaungsuban, has now vowed to ‘shut down’ Bangkok until the caretaker government resigns, even threatening to seize cabinet ministers. The PDRC argues that ‘reform’ is needed before any elections, in order to oust the ‘Thaksin regime’ – the dominant socio-political bloc formed by former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Yingluck’s brother, who was ousted in a coup in 2006 but whose successor parties have consistently dominated the elections held thereafter. Rejecting government invitations to participate in a reform committee, Suthep insists on a bizarre ‘people’s council’ of unelected notables, and a royally-appointed prime minister to purge Thailand’s political system. With the main opposition Democrat Party set to boycott the 2 February polls, an end to this political crisis seems nowhere in sight.

The current deadlock – just the latest in a series of protests and crises that have paralysed Thai politics since 2006 – can be traced back to the effects of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Thailand, where the crisis originated, was put under IMF strictures by the Democrat-led government, causing widespread hardship among workers and farmers but also serious losses by Thailand’s oligarchic business class. Thai capitalists regrouped around telecommunications magnate Thaksin Shinawatra, who recognised that the survival of the Thai business class required a largely unprecedented alliance with Thai farmers and workers. The result, Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai party, was a wildly popular platform combining welfare measures like 30 baht (about £0.50) healthcare with development policies like ‘one village, one product’ aimed at improving agricultural productivity and market access. This was a bold innovation: traditionally, Thai politics had been dominated by business, bureaucratic and military elites who treated ordinary voters with little respect, frequently bought votes, and operated in highly fluid pseudo-parties, changing allegiances as it suited them to gain access to state largesse after elections. Remarkably, after winning 40.6% of the vote in the 2001 elections, producing an unprecedented near-parliamentary majority, Thaksin delivered on his promises. He delivered concrete improvements in living standards for poor and lower-middle-class Thais, while rolling back IMF reforms to a level commensurate with Thai business interests. In 2005 he was re-elected with 56.4% of the vote, gaining 375 seats, a thumping legislative majority – the first in Thai history.

Yet, despite his popularity with Thailand’s lower orders, Thaksin gradually alienated growing numbers of capitalist, bureaucratic and political elites and middle-class voters. Notwithstanding his political creativity, Thaksin ruled much like any other Thai politician. His brutal ‘war on drugs’, despite proving widely popular, was used to eliminate local ‘godfathers’ resisting incorporation into TRT, with over 2,700 extrajudicial killings, while his heavy-handed approach to the predominantly Muslim South – where, outside of Bangkok’s middle classes, the Democrats have their main support base – restarted a bloody separatist insurgency. More importantly, perhaps, he rampantly exploited state power to advance the business interests of himself and his allies, alienating those excluded, including many former allies.

Eventually, opposition coalesced around a network of disgruntled big businessmen, Democrat politicians, and military and bureaucratic elites clustered around the palace. They portrayed Thaksin’s burgeoning wealth and power as a threat to Thai democracy and particularly the monarchy. Invoking a threat to the monarchy – which had been built into a revered institution by and in support of various authoritarian governments during the Cold War – mobilised many Thais onto the streets: asked to wear yellow to express support for the king, the ‘yellowshirt’ movement was born, formally called the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD). Street protests eventually compelled Thaksin to call early elections in April 2006. Yet, the Democrats refused to participate, knowing they had no chance of victory, resulting in another TRT victory. The PAD challenged the results in the constitutional court and, signalling the beginning of judicial activism, the result was nullified. New elections were scheduled for October, but before they could be held, Thaksin was overthrown by a military coup, granted post-hoc approval by the king.

Thai politics thereafter has essentially involved efforts by the ‘yellow’ faction to rig and manipulate the democratic system to preclude victory by Thaksin-esque forces, and struggles to resist this by Thaksin’s allies and popular supporters, known as ‘redshirts’ or the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD), which emerged to contest the 2006 coup. Despite alterations to the electoral system, due to their continued popularity, TRT’s successor parties consistently won by far the largest share of votes in every election since 2007. The yellow faction has consequently been forced into politicised lawsuits to oust ministers and dissolve parties – so-called ‘judicial coups’ – and even to initiate armed conflict with Cambodia, in order to oust their opponents. A brief period of Democrat rule, enabled by military backroom shenanigans, was also marked by massive rival street protests in Bangkok and a brutal crackdown on redshirt protestors in 2010. Nonetheless, another TRT-successor party, Pheu Thai, was returned to power in the 2011 elections under Yingluck. The current street protests are simply the latest attempt by the yellow faction to undemocratically overturn this result.

Fundamentally at stake here is who governs Thailand. Thaksin’s original gambit reflected and spurred a structural transformation of Thai society and politics: it treated the masses as political subjects, whose interests were worth taking into account. Moreover, the UDD insists that popular participation, not passivity, was now expected and required. The yellow faction, despite its opportunistic use of mass protests, is marked by its fundamental resistance to this mobilisation of the masses into Thai politics, regarding many redshirts as little more than uneducated peasants, and by its reluctance to sacrifice any of its privileges to share power and wealth with the lower orders, despite some limited Democrat copying of Thaksin’s policies. There is thus a strong class dimension to this struggle, complicated by the redshirts’ reliance on Thaksin’s oligarchic network for electoral leadership, and the inter-elite struggle over power, resource and business opportunities. This structural dynamic explains why Thailand’s crisis has been so persistent – eight years to date – and shows no sign of ebbing.

Can Suthep oust Yingluck from the streets? Probably not: despite his predictions of a million protestors to ‘shut down’ Bangkok, turnout has been relatively meagre (Suthep claims only 170,000; other eyewitnesses suggest far fewer) and dependent on supporters bussed in from the South. Nor can the undemocratic Democrats oust Pheu Thai electorally; hence their boycott on 2 February. The yellow faction seems entirely reliant on recreating 2006, hoping the military will step in to remove the government. Thus far, however, the army has showed little appetite for intervention. Their 2006-2007 dictatorship may have taught them that they lack the capacity to resolve Thailand’s deep-seated socio-political crisis. Yingluck has also pursued a cautious strategy of inter-elite reconciliation since 2011, sidelining many redshirt concerns – particularly the many political prisoners jailed for supposed lèse-majesté offences – to smoothen relations with the military and palace. She badly over-reached in November 2013 in proposing an Amnesty Bill which would have cleared the way for Thaksin’s return from self-exile, but also amnestied those responsible for the slaughter of redshirts in 2010, provoking fury from all sides and provoking the current wave of yellowshirt protests. Nonetheless she remains wedded to a conciliatory strategy, declining to mobilise the redshirts and bending over backwards to accommodate Suthep’s unreasonable demands. This reasonableness has avoided creating opportunities for military intervention while retaining the government’s moral high ground. The only route apparently open to the yellowshirts is to create such unrest that military intervention becomes necessary to maintain basic public order – which they seem unable to do – and/or to hope for sufficient electoral irregularities that another ‘judicial coup’ could be engineered after 2 February. Yet, past experience suggests these illiberal tactics cannot resolve the structural crisis of Thai society. As Einstein is (possibly apocryphally) said to have remarked, the definition of insanity is ‘doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results’.

Lee Jones