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This week’s student protests are part of a backlash against a monarchist elite trying to erase Thailand’s democratic history.

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Late one night in April 2017, a small brass plaque from the Royal Plaza in central Bangkok. Embedded in the asphalt close to an equestrian statue of a 19th-century king, it had been easy to overlook: just 12 inches across, with a ring of ornamental Thai script worn smooth by time. The plaque marked the spot where, 85 years earlier, a small band of revolutionaries the end of Thailand’s absolute monarchy, creating a constitutional political system modeled on Britain’s and relegating the Thai king to figurehead status.

The disappearance of the plaque bore all the signs of official involvement. CCTV cameras in the plaza at the time, and police warned journalists not to investigate its removal. The government later forced the Foreign Correspondents�� Club of Thailand to about the vanished plaque and an opposition politician who demanded its return with sedition.

The medallion was one of a number of monuments to the 1932 revolution that have been by Thailand’s government, in what critics describe as a systematic campaign to efface the country’s constitutional legacy and permanently cement the power of its military-royalist rulers. Over the past few years, monuments to the revolution have disappeared, statues of its leaders have been taken down, and buildings and military institutes whose names honored the revolution have been renamed.

Critics call it a systematic campaign to efface the country’s constitutional legacy and permanently cement the power of its military-royalist rulers.

Just as Western nations are debating the toppling of statues to slave owners and colonial plunderers, the removal of the Thai monuments has sparked a public discussion about the legacy of the 1932 revolution, a pivotal event in Thailand’s modern history. At the forefront is a young generation of political activists who have mobilized the legacy of 1932 in order to assail the legitimacy of the government led by Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, a former army officer who came to power in a military coup in 2014 and subsequently headed the military junta that ruled Thailand until March 2019, when he prevailed in a controversial and .

On June 24, the 88th anniversary of the revolution, around 100 political activists, some dressed in replica period military uniforms, in a pre-dawn demonstration close to Bangkok’s Democracy Monument, the largest surviving monument to the 1932 revolution. There, a speaker read out the of the revolution’s leaders. During this and other commemorations, the missing Bangkok plaque figured prominently. A mock-up of the medallion was during gatherings, and activists on T-shirts, playing cards, pancakes, and cookies. One Thai netizen even created that superimposes the plaque on photos of the ground.

The anniversary commemoration has since flowed into calling for Prayuth’s resignation, a new constitution, curbs on the power of the monarchy, and the end to the routine harassment () of political dissidents. On Monday, up to gathered at Bangkok’s Thammasat University, a longtime locus of student activism. Chanting “long live democracy�� to calls for Prayuth to step down, they also issued a startlingly frank list of 10 demands for reducing the powers of the monarchy, referencing the 1932 revolution.

Pravit Rojanaphruk, a journalist for the newspaper Khaosod English who has covered the removal of revolutionary monuments, said the event 88 years ago has become more prominent in public discourse than at any time he could remember. “This year’s June 24 commemoration piqued the interest of young Thais in wanting to learn more about the past like never before,�� he told Foreign Policy. “A new generation is discovering a past that some people don’t want them to know.��

The bloodless revolt of June 24, 1932, was a watershed in modern Thai history, abruptly curtailing nearly 700 years of absolute rule.

The bloodless revolt of June 24, 1932, was a watershed in modern Thai history. Led by an elite group of French-educated civil servants and soldiers known as the People’s Party (Khana Ratsadon), the revolution overthrew King Prajadhipok and abruptly curtailed nearly 700 years of absolute rule. The Thai king, once revered as a godlike figure who emanated supernatural power, was shackled by a constitution for the first time. By the end of World War II, as Paul Handley in his sweeping biography of the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who took the throne in 1946, the “king’s powers and prerogatives were gone, and much of the throne’s prestige had withered. The ranks of celestial princes were dangerously thin, and the crown’s magnificent wealth had been stripped away.��

Chonthicha Jangrew, a pro-democracy and human rights activist who took part in several events marking the anniversary, described 1932 as a milestone in the progress of a democratic tradition in Thailand. “It is part of our democratic roots that show us how Thais fought to establish democratic values,�� she told Foreign Policy.

But the years following World War II saw a royalist counterattack, including the establishment of the elite nexus that is now reasserting itself against demands for democratic reform. A military coup in 1947 led to the writing of a new constitution that restored to the monarchy many of the powers taken from it in 1932. Through the dizzying rotation of governments, coups, and constitutions that marked the subsequent decades, the monarchy and military established a firm alliance, rooted in the common threat of communism and reinforced from without by strong American support during the Cold War. Equating the integrity of the monarchy with the security of the nation, palace and barracks in a mutual survival pact that guaranteed the preservation of each other’s powers and prerogatives. Even as the leaders of the People’s Party were publicly feted in stone and marble, their legacy was hollowed out from within.

Over the decades, Thailand’s military-monarchy nexus legitimated itself via an ideology that Thongchai Winichakul, a former student activist in Thailand who is now a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has as “hyper-royalism.�� The monarchy was reinfused with godly power and positioned as the guardian of “true�� democracy. Courtly practices like ritual prostration, by Siam’s modernizing King Chulalongkorn in 1873, were revived. (To this day, even the prime minister is required to prostrate himself at the feet of the king.) The events of 1932 were to schoolchildren, if they were taught at all, while the state fashioned a cult of personality around the king, characterized by songs, flattering documentaries, and public images. While Bhumibol was a genuinely popular monarch during his 70-year reign, traveling his kingdom and spearheading extensive charity works, his reputation was ring-fenced by a harsh that criminalized any criticism of the royal family.

Thanavi Chotpradit, a professor of art history at Silpakorn University in Bangkok, said the removal of monuments to the 1932 revolution represents the logical culmination of this decades-long attempt to delegitimize and erase reminders of Thailand’s constitutional past. “I see it as a reclaiming of the royal territory, both physically and ideologically,�� she said. “It demonstrates an exercise of the monarchy’s power.��

To this day, even the prime minister is required to prostrate himself at the feet of the king.

Many royalist-minded Thais have long seen the monuments, symbols, and architectural styles of the post-1932 period as a “painful physical reminder of a time when royal prestige was at its lowest,�� said James Buchanan, a doctoral researcher at the City University of Hong Kong who specializes in Thai politics. But it was only relatively recently that the 1932 revolution reentered the Thai political consciousness. It was even more recently that monuments started to disappear.

One key factor, observers say, is the accession of King Maha Vajiralongkorn, who took the throne following the death of his father, Bhumibol, in October 2016. Since then, the government has sped up its efforts to remove 1932 from Thai history. This has been paralleled by Vajiralongkorn and his allies�� , which has involved the appointment of loyalists to the upper echelons of the military, the purging of perceived rivals, and the rehabilitation of traditions from the days of absolute monarchy. In 2017, Vajiralongkorn assumed of the mammoth Crown Property Bureau, which manages the monarchy’s estimated $30 billion in assets and landholdings. Two months after his coronation in 2019, he took an , the first king to do so since Chulalongkorn.

In a broader sense, the dispute over the legacy of 1932 has also grown out of the intense and protracted political crisis that has gripped Thai politics since 2005. This pitted the country’s military-royalist elite against supporters of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a billionaire telecommunications tycoon who was elected by a landslide in 2001 on promises of universal health care and microloans, which garnered overwhelming support in marginalized parts of rural Thailand. Thaksin’s political successes soon came to threaten the wealth and power of Thailand’s urban, royalist elites, who resorted to increasingly undemocratic methods to curb his influence.

When a military coup in 2006 removed Thaksin from office, his supporters, known as Red Shirts, massed in the streets and helped his proxies win elections in 2008 and 2011. Red Shirt leaders actively claimed the legacy of the 1932 revolution, marking the June 24 anniversary with protests and holding rallies at monuments including the Constitution Defense Monument in Bangkok, which commemorates the quashing of a royalist countercoup in 1933. (The monument was without notice in December 2018.) As the 1932 revolution was conscripted into Thailand’s political battle, it spurred further calls by royalists—led by their own supporters, the Yellow Shirts—to scrub away all traces of this assault on monarchical privilege.

According to Thongchai, the dispute over the legacy of 1932 traces a deeper division between those who believe that political authority ought to derive from the will of the people and those who think it should be vested in a traditional elite claiming a moral right to rule. At the core of this, he said, “is the place and the extent of the power of the monarchy in Thailand’s democracy.��

Remarkably, this sensitive question is now being aired openly for the first time in many decades. At recent rallies, young demonstrators have waved signs calling to ��,�� the section in the Thai criminal code that punishes any criticism of the royal family. Others have risked prison by that the palace’s powers be curbed, displaying a candor that was virtually unknown during Bhumibol’s reign.

The effort to remove the last remaining symbols of Thailand’s democratic revolution may have simply drawn further attention to its legacy.

Online, criticisms have been just as explicit. A Thai-language hashtag that translates to #WhyDoWeNeedAKing? has on Twitter, as has one calling for a on graduation ceremonies, traditionally presided over by members of the royal family. Netizens have actively assailed the behavior of the 68-year-old king, who spends most of his time in southern Germany, particularly his during the coronavirus pandemic.

While open criticism of the monarchy is a risky business—on July 9, one Facebook user who posted a picture of himself wearing a T-shirt printed with the words “I lost faith in the monarchy�� was to a psychiatric institution—the authorities may find this genie hard to put back in the bottle. Prayuth told reporters he was “concerned�� by Monday’s protests, but has given no clue as to how the government will react.

Indeed, the effort to remove the last remaining symbols of Thailand’s democratic revolution may have simply drawn further attention to its legacy, restaging once again the social and political struggles that have dominated Thai politics for the past century. “Suddenly it’s like we’re back in 1932 again,�� Buchanan said, “with some sections of the population preferring the monarchy be kept in check by the constitution, while royal-nationalists seek to defend its sanctity.�� It is a question that seems to be coming to a head once more.

Published in , August 11, 2020.

If the West truly wants to change Hun Sen’s behavior, it needs to understand how he sees the world.

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On August 12, the European Union will finally follow through on its threat to impose a on Cambodia. The long-awaited move, which will restore tariffs on around a quarter of Cambodia’s exports, comes in response to a fierce political crackdown by the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), which has seen it outlaw the main opposition party, jail political opponents, and on the 2018 national elections �� all while nuzzling up to Xi Jinping’s China.

The EU’s action is indicative of a broader hardening of attitudes toward Prime Minister Hun Sen’s government. Members of the U.S. Congress have similar trade restrictions, and the Treasury Department three of Hun Sen’s cronies with sanctions. Yet these measures are unlikely to push Cambodia back onto a democratic path, nor to prize it away from China’s smothering embrace. Instead, they are deepening a pattern of mutual incomprehension that has dogged Western relations with Cambodia for nearly three decades.

The primary shortcoming in Western policy has been a lack of what is sometimes termed “cognitive empathy��: , the ability of policymakers “to [put] themselves in the shoes of the world’s various actors and see how the world looks to them.�� As Western nations punish Hun Sen for his authoritarian turn and embrace of China, they seemingly give little thought to how their actions are viewed in Phnom Penh, nor to the broader political and ideological dynamics that have brought relations to this point.

This failure is not surprising. Cambodia is a small nation and attracts fleeting attention in Western capitals. After more than 35 years in power, Hun Sen gripes about events that are now either forgotten or deemed arcane to today’s policy debates. Finally, the Cambodian leader has not helped his own cause with his , ruthless , and rambling Castro-esque speeches.

Yet understanding how the CPP views the world is important, if only because it is central to explaining Cambodia’s eager entry into China’s orbit. The purpose is not to defend the CPP worldview, which contains many exaggerations and falsehoods, nor to excuse the party’s corruption and repression, but rather to understand how it views its core interests, and how it is likely to respond to Western policies.

The worldview of Cambodia’s senior leadership is inseparable from the country’s turbulent path through the 20th century. Born in rural Kampong Cham in August 1952, Hun Sen came of age in a time of intense conflict and dislocation, as Cambodia was drawn into the raging conflict in Vietnam. In the late 1960s, as American B-52s rained their bombs down on eastern Cambodia, he joined the country’s communist insurgency, known to history as the Khmer Rouge. After helping the Khmer Rouge take power in April 1975, Hun Sen served the murderous regime for two years before defecting to Vietnam in mid-1977.

In January 1979, the Vietnamese military overthrew the Khmer Rouge, and Hun Sen became foreign minister in the new government installed by Hanoi. Instead of being given credit for ending Cambodia’s nightmare, however, the new administration was ostracized and embargoed by the West. Meanwhile, the surviving Khmer Rouge and two other non-communist resistance factions were offered diplomatic succor and military support from China, the United States, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

This embargo was the product of simple Cold War realpolitik: the desire of Beijing and Washington to isolate Soviet-backed Vietnam. But it fueled a further round of conflict in Cambodia and hampered the country’s reconstruction. It also profoundly shaped the worldview of Hun Sen and his colleagues. This decade of isolation instilled in Hun Sen an abiding resentment about the world’s lack of recognition for his government’s achievements, and an inverse craving for international acceptance. It also inculcated a deep skepticism about Western governments�� invocations of liberal values.

In October 1991, four Cambodian factions, including the CPP, came together to sign the , which were designed to end Cambodia’s civil war, send refugees home, and introduce a multiparty democratic system. For the Western democracies, Paris was a watershed: It drew a line under an era in which Cambodia was victim of superpower conflict, and initiated a new era in which the world would bring a long-suffering people the gifts of peace and democracy.

The CPP saw things differently. In effective control of the country since 1979, it had the most to lose from free elections. Having helped topple the Khmer Rouge, the CPP equated its own rule with the preservation of a hard-won stability and peace. Giving any ground to its former wartime enemies �� formerly allied with the Khmer Rouge and now competing as political parties �� threatened a return to chaos. This justified any measure to secure its continued rule.

Beginning with the UN-organized 1993 election, which the CPP lost to Funcinpec, a royalist party, the CPP bullied and threatened its way into an equal share of power in a coalition government. In July 1997, Hun Sen used lethal force to quash the challenge posed by Funcinpec’s armed wing, and seized de facto control of government. An election in 1998, conducted in a climate of fear, established Hun Sen as Cambodia’s sole prime minister, a position he has held ever since.

During this period, Cambodia’s domestic political struggles acquired an ideological valence. Viewing Cambodia as strategically marginal, Western governments saw it as a country where they could push values-based policies without incurring a significant political cost. Some Cambodian politicians harnessed this ideological energy for their own ends. One was Sam Rainsy, a former Funcinpec minister, who lobbied tirelessly in Western capitals, painting Cambodian politics as a simple struggle between democrats and dictators. To local audiences, meanwhile, he played on potent nationalist anxieties about Vietnam, attacking the CPP leadership as puppets of Hanoi.

After the violence of July 1997, Hun Sen came under increased American pressure, most notably from within the U.S. Congress. Republican hawks Hun Sen a “new Pol Pot,�� attempted to American aid on Hun Sen not being in power, and for regime change. American-funded democracy promotion groups, including the International Republican Institute, were for Sam Rainsy, who was at conservative think-tanks in Washington. Congressional pressure hampered attempts by American diplomats to engage productively with the CPP government.

As liberal ideology was conscripted into Cambodia’s domestic political struggles, the CPP grew increasingly suspicious of American democracy promotion efforts. Given past U.S. actions in Cambodia, Hun Sen viewed Washington’s criticisms about human rights as grossly hypocritical. Moreover, he chafed at being held to higher standards than more strategically important nations, like neighboring Thailand (and, later, Vietnam). The lines between democratic advocacy and regime change became muddled. Soon enough, anyone seeking to advance democracy and human rights was, by definition, opposed to CPP rule.

Enter Beijing. The Chinese than the Americans to prop up the Khmer Rouge, but they expressed no opinion about how Hun Sen ruled the country. In 1997, when Western nations withheld aid, China stepped into the breach. In their dawning convergence of interests, Beijing and Phnom Penh agreed to bury their past grievances. Over the next 15 years, as Hun Sen’s periodic crackdowns stoked tensions with the West, his government moved gradually closer to China.

These tensions burst forth following national elections in July 2013, when the CPP hemorrhaged support to the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), a new unified opposition party led by Sam Rainsy. The election was followed by massive street demonstrations against election fraud. In the ensuing crackdown, several protesters were shot dead. In the aftermath, the CPP government was jittery. Looking ahead to the next elections in 2018, it promised reforms, forced Sam Rainsy into exile, and tightened restrictions on Cambodian civil society.

All the while, Cambodia was attracting increasing attention in Washington. In 2017, as U.S. attitudes toward China soured rapidly under President Donald Trump, Cambodia suddenly commanded attention as a Chinese vassal-state. Rainsy, who had spent most of his career attacking Hun Sen’s ties to Vietnam, suddenly began pushing an anti-Chinese line.

Paranoid about his hold on power, and fearing what the United States might do in the event of another close-run election, Hun Sen left nothing to chance. In September 2017, police arrested CNRP President Kem Sokha on charges of treason. Two months later, a CPP-controlled court banned the CNRP outright and clamped down on civil society and the independent media. Absent any real opposition, the CPP went on to “win�� all 125 seats in the National Assembly.

In the aftermath, the U.S. and other Western governments decried the conduct of the election. But for the past few years, Hun Sen had watched on as a parade of right-abusing Southeast Asian leaders �� from Vietnamese Communist Party head Nguyen Phu Trong to Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines to Thai junta leader Prayut Chan-o-cha �� were invited to Washington. All this merely reinforced Hun Sen’s view that there was one rule for Cambodia, and another for the rest of Southeast Asia. All the while, China continued to roll out the red carpet for Hun Sen on his frequent visits to Beijing.

When the EU threatened to suspend Cambodia’s preferential access to the European market, Hun Sen’s reaction was predictable: He decried it as a violation of Cambodian sovereignty, tightened the political space further, and leaned more heavily on China. The fact that the EU was concurrently negotiating a free trade agreement with Vietnam, a one-party dictatorship, only underlined the CPP’s perception that Brussels, by threatening to cast hundreds of thousands of Cambodian workers out of work, was seeking to unseat the CPP government and tip the country back into turmoil. Adding further fuel was Sam Rainsy, who, in between lobbying for harsh EU sanctions, called for the Cambodian people to �� to oust Hun Sen.�� In July 2019, he that “the law-abiding international community must work to put an end to the Hun Sen regime.��

Gazing out at the world at the start of 2020, Hun Sen saw an array of hostile Western powers that would happily acquiesce in the CPP’s removal from power, if not actively seek to bring it about. Meanwhile, in the middle distance, sat a benevolent China, offering Cambodia protection from the perils of a “color revolution.�� This conclusion, grossly exaggerated though it may be, was in many ways the logical outgrowth of a particular worldview: one born under the thunder of American B-52s and forged during the cruel final decade of the Cold War.

One of Cambodia’s tragedies is that it has never been seen as important enough to be taken seriously on its own terms, rather than being viewed in the light of wider ideological and geopolitical struggles. The same danger is present now, as Cambodia is drawn into the escalating rivalry between the U.S. and China. Hun Sen bears a heavy burden of responsibility for this turn of events, but it might have been forestalled somewhat had Western policymakers made an effort to contemplate the view from Phnom Penh. Such an effort will be necessary if the current tension is not to harden into permanent enmity.

Published by , July 17, 2020

As US-China tensions grow and temperatures rise in the South China Sea, Southeast Asia will only become more tense, anxious and constrained.

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Making predictions is difficult, the old saying goes, especially when dealing with the future. The coronavirus pandemic has nonetheless prompted a raft of speculation about its geopolitical impact on Southeast Asia. Some observers have suggested Covid-19 will catalyse a regional pushback against China, others that the virus will lead to a new Chinese-led order in the Indo-Pacific.

As tempting as it is to predict grand transformations, the pandemic is unlikely to fundamentally alter the challenges China poses to Southeast Asia. Instead, it will simply sharpen those that already exist. Covid-19 will be a way station rather than a crossroads.

Since its emergence late last year, Covid-19 has prompted a steady deterioration in relations between the United States and China, an acceleration of pre-existing trends. As Beijing and Washington traded childish insults and conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus, neither has done much to improve its image in a region that worries about nothing more than a runaway escalation in superpower tensions.

For Southeast Asia, Covid-19 has revealed the two faces of Chinese power: the benefactor and the bully. While Beijing has shipped masks and medical equipment to nearly every nation in the region, it has undercut this goodwill by stoking tensions with Vietnam and Malaysia in the South China Sea, and provoking showdowns with regional powers such as India and Australia.

Meanwhile, the belligerent performances of its officials �� call it “own-goal diplomacy�� �� is doing little to engender warm feelings among Southeast Asians.

Of course, Southeast Asia has seen this before. As former Malaysian prime minister Abdul Razak observed in 1971, Southeast Asia’s proximity to China ensures its countries are the first to live with the consequences of Chinese policies. This proximity has long been a mixed blessing. Just as Southeast Asia has been buoyed by China’s meteoric economic growth since the 1980s, it has also experienced disruptive flows of immigration and investment, as well as the keen edge of Beijing’s growing naval and military clout.

Southeast Asian nations continue to distrust China on a range of issues from its maritime aggression to its ��outreach to the region’s overseas Chinese. It has nonetheless evolved into a close economic partner and, for some, a politically useful one.

Covid-19 is unlikely to alter this. The early stages of the pandemic exposed the region’s heavy economic reliance on China, prompting rumblings that some Southeast Asian nations would seek to reduce their economic reliance on mainland-centred supply chains.

This, too, is nothing new. Vietnam, for example, has long attempted to reduce its economic dependence on China, a concern that underpinned its enthusiasm for the US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The coronavirus is unlikely to lead to any dramatic change soon in this regard. For one thing, shifting supply chains is hard. It is particularly difficult in the shadow of a looming economic crisis that could dwarf the impact of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the political aftershocks of which are still being felt.

China is the leading trade partner of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and eight of its 10 member states, which source most of their manufacturing-related inputs from the Chinese mainland. This ensures China will play an important role in Southeast Asia’s attempts to weather the economic and political effects of the pandemic.

The pandemic will further exacerbate the internal political challenges facing Southeast Asian nations. These run from intractable questions of national identity �� who counts as a citizen, and who should have access to political power �� to the economic nationalism that has long hamstrung regional integration into a single economic community. By initiating a regional turn inward, Covid-19 will only make it harder for the region to detach itself from China.

Add to this, the missteps of the US. In January and February, as the coronavirus was ravaging China, US officials and pundits delighted in depicting it as a by-product of China’s authoritarian political system. The unintended consequence was to invite a comparison between China’s ruthlessly effective containment of the contagion �� early failures notwithstanding �� and America’s own shambolic response. This has tarnished perceptions of American competence and leadership.

Despite Washington’s robust support for Southeast Asia’s pandemic fight, the administration’s withdrawal from the multilateralism that Asean cherishes has only reinforced prevailing regional perceptions of the US as an erratic power that lurches between episodic engagement and starkly ideological with-us-or-against-us rhetoric.

This has been encapsulated by the region’s response to the Trump administration’s attempts to blame China for the Covid-19 outbreak. Southeast Asian governments undoubtedly want answers about the origins of the virus and China’s bungled early response, but they have resisted being conscripted into a US-led fight with Beijing. Of the 122 nations that supported a draft motion at the World Health Assembly in the face of Chinese opposition, just two �� Malaysia and Indonesia �� were from Southeast Asia. A similar response greeted Washington’s push for the region to spurn 5G technology from Huawei.

While Southeast Asian nations are strongly supportive of a robust US presence as a counterweight to China, the Huawei and Covid-19 affairs have highlighted where American and Southeast Asian concerns about Beijing diverge.

By accelerating US-China tensions, the pandemic is dialling up strategic pressures on Southeast Asian nations and making it trickier to maintain the individual and collective balance they have always sought. The region that emerges from Covid-19 is set to be tenser, more anxious and more constrained �� in short, more of the same.

Published in the , June 26, 2020

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Just few years ago, Myanmar (also called Burma) was widely seen as an international success story. In March 2011, after half a century of military rule, a quasi-civilian government led by the former general Thein Sein came to power and embarked on a remarkable campaign of political and economic reforms. Over the next year and a half, the government released dissidents, lifted press censorship, let the democratic icon Aung San Suu Kyi reenter politics after spending years under house arrest, and opened peace talks with more than a dozen rebel groups. President Thein Sein’s administration also took important steps to rationalize an economy distorted by decades of autarkic socialist policies and harsh Western sanctions.

On the foreign policy front, Myanmar spurned China, its overbearing patron, by suspending unpopular infrastructure projects, and it moved to improve relations with the United States and the West. In late 2011, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Yangon. Shortly after, Barack Obama made the first-ever visit to Myanmar by a sitting U.S. president, touting “the power of a new beginning.�� As liberalization proceeded, Western countries lifted sanctions, and Myanmar rejoined the world. Aid and investment flooded into the country, along with a parade of luminaries—from the financier and philanthropist George Soros to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair—eager to participate in a seemingly historic transformation.

Myanmar’s democratic transition reached its apex on November 8, 2015, when Aung San Suu Kyi led her party, the National League for Democracy, to a staggering victory in national elections. The following March, Thein Sein handed over power to the new administration. It was the first peaceful transfer of power in Myanmar since 1960. A country once mentioned in the same breath as North Korea had seemingly flipped onto the right side of history.

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Pressure from Brussels risks deepening Phnom Penh’s close engagement with China

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s authoritarian government is coming under increasing pressure from the European Union to revitalize the country’s floundering democracy or face trade restrictions. But the EU should think again. Its threats are unlikely to work, and risk pushing Cambodia deeper into the arms of China.

The issue is urgent. Hun Sen’s government has less than a month to respond to an EU report concluding that Cambodia should lose the trade privileges it enjoys under the bloc’s Everything But Arms trade program because of a “deterioration�� in the political situation since a review was launched in February. The EU will announce its final decision in February 2020.

The loss of European trade perks would be painful for Cambodia. In 2018, 45% of its exports went to the EU �� mostly garments and apparel. If the EBA benefits are suspended, the World Bank has estimated the annual loss of export revenues at between $513 million and $654 million. Mass layoffs are also likely as factories respond to falling demand.

The EU’s objective is to force Cambodia to reverse a steep slide into authoritarianism following the arrest of Kem Sokha, president of the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, and the banning of his party in late 2017. The ban allowed Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP, to win all 125 seats in the Cambodian National Assembly in elections in July 2018.

The pressure from Brussels has had some effect. On November 10, the Cambodian government released Kem Sokha from house arrest after two years of detention on treason charges. A few days later, Hun Sen ordered the release on bail of more than 70 political activists, most detained in recent weeks to stymie a threat by Sam Rainsy, an exiled former CNRP president, to return to Cambodia on November 9 to lead a “People Power�� uprising against the government. Rainsy has since returned to Paris and is still promising to return, despite facing imprisonment on a raft of political charges.

These moves raise the likelihood of a negotiated settlement �� potentially involving the reinstatement of the CNRP as a legal entity �� that would head off a withdrawal of EBA trade privileges. But the longer-term picture is fuzzier. Hun Sen has a long history of making temporary concessions in response to foreign pressure and later winding them back. Those freed from jail could easily be detained again. Kem Sokha’s release is also an attempt to exploit a long-standing rivalry between the two CNRP leaders in the hope of hampering the opposition.

Setting aside Hun Sen’s tactical adroitness, the tensions between Cambodia and the EU raise deeper questions about the wisdom and efficacy of using external pressure to compel democratic change. Cambodia has been subjected to outside forces more than most other Southeast Asian countries. During the Cold War, the nation was trampled by dueling superpowers. In 1991, the Paris Peace Agreements, intended to end the country’s long civil war, turned it into an international project of betterment: a subject for interventions of a different kind.

Since then, Cambodia’s politics has played out in intricate dialectic with a variety of external actors. The Western media’s prevailing view of Cambodia as a simple struggle between democrats and dictators conceals the complex ways in which outside forces have been conscripted into bitter domestic struggles since the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979.

Since entering opposition in 1995, Sam Rainsy has focused much of his energy on mobilizing international support for Cambodia’s democratization, while playing on traditional ethno-nationalist anxieties about Vietnamese domination at home.

This offers important context for his aborted return to the country on November 9. It was never likely to happen in the face of concerted government opposition. But while the plan failed to trigger a democratic uprising, it succeeded as an international publicity stunt on the eve of the EBA decision.

Meanwhile, one of Hun Sen’s long-term goals has been to court alternative outside forces that can provide the backing necessary to keep his party, and himself, in power. This has led Cambodia toward China, which has become the dominant economic presence in the country. Instead of trying to remake Cambodia in a liberal image, Beijing has offered substantial financial backing and investment within an avowed framework of national sovereignty and noninterference.

Over time, Chinese backing has slowly reduced the leverage of Western democracies. As a result, the pattern of Western pressure followed by political concessions from Phnom Penh has masked a steady political consolidation by the CPP. Seen in this light, the EU’s threat to withdraw trade preferences, threatening a large chunk of Cambodia’s export economy, is a measure of how far the ground has shifted.

While the past is no guarantee of the future, the last three decades of Cambodian history demonstrate the limits of the potential for outside actors to effect the complex process of democratic change. While external pressure can sometimes compel positive actions, it is unlikely to transform the mindset of those in power.

It also incurs a cost. Whatever the resolution to the standoff over Cambodia’s EBA privileges, the episode will harden the CPP’s resolve to reduce its reliance on Western governments in favor of outside powers such as China that prioritize transactional engagement over human rights or liberal norms of behavior.

Instead of proving the efficacy of outside pressure, the EBA affair may well end up demonstrating its limits.

Published by the , November 19, 2019

Beijing offers financial backing under framework of noninterference

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s authoritarian government is coming under increasing pressure from the European Union to revitalize the country’s floundering democracy or face trade restrictions. But the EU should think again. Its threats are unlikely to work, and risk pushing Cambodia deeper into the arms of China.

The issue is urgent. Hun Sen’s government has less than a month to respond to an EU report concluding that Cambodia should lose the trade privileges it enjoys under the bloc’s Everything But Arms trade program because of a “deterioration�� in the political situation since a review was launched in February. The EU will announce its final decision in February 2020.

The loss of European trade perks would be painful for Cambodia. In 2018, 45% of its exports went to the EU �� mostly garments and apparel. If the EBA benefits are suspended, the World Bank has estimated the annual loss of export revenues at between $513 million and $654 million. Mass layoffs are also likely as factories respond to falling demand.

The EU’s objective is to force Cambodia to reverse a steep slide into authoritarianism following the arrest of Kem Sokha, president of the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, and the banning of his party in late 2017. The ban allowed Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP, to win all 125 seats in the Cambodian National Assembly in elections in July 2018.

The pressure from Brussels has had some effect. On November 10, the Cambodian government released Kem Sokha from house arrest after two years of detention on treason charges. A few days later, Hun Sen ordered the release on bail of more than 70 political activists, most detained in recent weeks to stymie a threat by Sam Rainsy, an exiled former CNRP president, to return to Cambodia on November 9 to lead a “People Power�� uprising against the government. Rainsy has since returned to Paris and is still promising to return, despite facing imprisonment on a raft of political charges.

These moves raise the likelihood of a negotiated settlement �� potentially involving the reinstatement of the CNRP as a legal entity �� that would head off a withdrawal of EBA trade privileges. But the longer-term picture is fuzzier. Hun Sen has a long history of making temporary concessions in response to foreign pressure and later winding them back. Those freed from jail could easily be detained again. Kem Sokha’s release is also an attempt to exploit a long-standing rivalry between the two CNRP leaders in the hope of hampering the opposition.

Setting aside Hun Sen’s tactical adroitness, the tensions between Cambodia and the EU raise deeper questions about the wisdom and efficacy of using external pressure to compel democratic change. Cambodia has been subjected to outside forces more than most other Southeast Asian countries. During the Cold War, the nation was trampled by dueling superpowers. In 1991, the Paris Peace Agreements, intended to end the country’s long civil war, turned it into an international project of betterment: a subject for interventions of a different kind.

Since then, Cambodia’s politics has played out in intricate dialectic with a variety of external actors. The Western media’s prevailing view of Cambodia as a simple struggle between democrats and dictators conceals the complex ways in which outside forces have been conscripted into bitter domestic struggles since the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979.

Since entering opposition in 1995, Sam Rainsy has focused much of his energy on mobilizing international support for Cambodia’s democratization, while playing on traditional ethno-nationalist anxieties about Vietnamese domination at home.

This offers important context for his aborted return to the country on November 9. It was never likely to happen in the face of concerted government opposition. But while the plan failed to trigger a democratic uprising, it succeeded as an international publicity stunt on the eve of the EBA decision.

Meanwhile, one of Hun Sen’s long-term goals has been to court alternative outside forces that can provide the backing necessary to keep his party, and himself, in power. This has led Cambodia toward China, which has become the dominant economic presence in the country. Instead of trying to remake Cambodia in a liberal image, Beijing has offered substantial financial backing and investment within an avowed framework of national sovereignty and noninterference.

Over time, Chinese backing has slowly reduced the leverage of Western democracies. As a result, the pattern of Western pressure followed by political concessions from Phnom Penh has masked a steady political consolidation by the CPP. Seen in this light, the EU’s threat to withdraw trade preferences, threatening a large chunk of Cambodia’s export economy, is a measure of how far the ground has shifted.

While the past is no guarantee of the future, the last three decades of Cambodian history demonstrate the limits of the potential for outside actors to effect the complex process of democratic change. While external pressure can sometimes compel positive actions, it is unlikely to transform the mindset of those in power.

It also incurs a cost. Whatever the resolution to the standoff over Cambodia’s EBA privileges, the episode will harden the CPP’s resolve to reduce its reliance on Western governments in favor of outside powers such as China that prioritize transactional engagement over human rights or liberal norms of behavior.

Instead of proving the efficacy of outside pressure, the EBA affair may well end up demonstrating its limits.

Published by the , November 19, 2019

The possible establishment of a Chinese naval presence in Cambodia is the logical outcome of long-flawed U.S. policies towards Phnom Penh.

[image error]On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Cambodia and China recently signed a secret agreement granting the latter exclusive rights to part of a naval installation on the Gulf of Thailand.

The report, quoting unnamed American and allied officials, said the agreement would allow China to use the Ream Naval Base for 30 years, with automatic renewals every 10 years thereafter.

The news follows months of speculation that Prime Minister Hun Sen’s government is preparing to host the Chinese navy in southern Cambodia, and months of denials from Cambodian officials that any such plan is in the works. On Monday, the premier declared that the WSJ’s report constituted “the worst ever made-up news against Cambodia.��

Given its potential to alter the balance of power in Southeast Asia, the possibility of a Chinese naval outpost being established in Cambodia has prompted justified alarm in Washington.

In a statement, the US State Department expressed concern that a Chinese military presence would threaten the coherence of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and “disturb peace and stability in Southeast Asia.��

In some ways, however, the establishment of a Chinese naval presence in Cambodia—perilous though it is for both the country and the wider region—is the logical outcome of the existing American policy towards Cambodia.

Since the early 1990s, Western countries including the US have focused heavily on the goal of fostering Western-style democracy, a project that has done little but push long-ruling Hun Sen down the well-trodden pariah’s path to Beijing.

American and Western perceptions of Cambodia remain profoundly shaped by the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements, which brought together four warring Cambodian factions, including Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), in a bid to end a long civil war. The Paris treaty created a United Nations peacekeeping mission to implement its terms, which coordinated democratic elections in May 1993.

Signed in the final months of the Cold War, the treaty turned Cambodia into a pet project of the emerging liberal world order. During this period, the Western view of the country became fairly set: a tragic country ravaged by war and revolution, Cambodia would now be ushered towards democracy and development by a unified “international community.�� The only thing standing in the way of history’s grand design was Hun Sen, a one-eyed former Khmer Rouge commander appointed prime minister in 1985.

This perception of Cambodia has proven curiously persistent. One reason surely is the character of Hun Sen, a gruff, belligerent figure who fit the role of villain perfectly. Another reason was the efforts of Hun Sen’s opponents, particularly Sam Rainsy, a French former banker, whose constant lobbying in Western capitals helped reinforce this good-versus-evil view of Cambodian politics.

The main reason, however, was the perception that Cambodia was small and strategically marginal, and therefore a place, as one American official said of Myanmar in 1989, “where the United States has the luxury of living up to its principles.��

Together, these factors helped frame Cambodia as a worthy subject of human rights concern (and pressure to that end), but a nation strangely untethered from the wider story of the shifting balance of power in Southeast Asia.

From the very beginning, however, Cambodia’s status as an international “project�� has been resisted by Hun Sen and his government.

Coming after a decade of civil war in which the US and its allies had cynically backed the remnants of the Khmer Rouge, the communist government that turned Cambodia into a killing field from 1975 to 1979 before being driven from power by the Vietnamese army, the West’s uplifting language about democracy rang hollow.

For this reason and others, the CPP saw democracy less a gift from the West than as a sophisticated way of edging it out of power.

Hun Sen and company therefore set about subverting these new democratic institutions, seething all the while at Western governments�� insistence on holding Cambodia to higher standards than those it accepted elsewhere.

To be sure, Hun Sen did little to help his own image, ruthlessly suppressing his opponents, selling off the country’s resources to the benefit of a small elite, and raging from his bully pulpit.

Nonetheless, it is true that his government came under much closer scrutiny on questions of human rights than more strategically important neighboring countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, and the Philippines, whose leaders have all in recent years received invitations to the White House.

Persisting over the years, this differential treatment morphed into a perception that Western democracy promotion efforts concealed a hidden agenda: to kick the CPP out of power.

These fears deepened following elections in 2013, when the CPP hemorrhaged support to the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), led by Sam Rainsy, which then launched a campaign of massive Arab Spring-style street demonstrations calling for Hun Sen’s resignation and investigations into alleged electoral fraud. The protests shook the CPP, which feared that events might escape its control.

These fears of regime change are not entirely unfounded. Over the years, hawkish members of the US Congress have called for regime change in Cambodia; in 2003, one tabled a bill that would make American aid levels contingent on Hun Sen’s departure from power.

Figures like Sam Rainsy have also stepped close to the line of openly advocating popular uprisings against the CPP government. In recent months, Rainsy has called on troops to disobey orders from the government and for the people to “take to the streets to oust Hun Sen.��

He also declared that “the law-abiding international community must work to put an end to the Hun Sen regime.�� Whatever one thinks of him, it’s hard to blame Cambodia’s leader for taking such proclamations at face value.

This is where China comes in. A minor player when the Paris Agreements were signed in 1991, China has since risen to become Cambodia’s most important international backer, its main trade partner, and its primary source of tourism and foreign investment.

That Hun Sen has cast open the door so widely to Beijing is no surprise. Given his suspicions of Western intentions, and the continuing attempts by his opponents to leverage American and European pressure against him, it was predictable that he would gravitate towards a rising power with deep pockets and a shared disdain for human rights.

Previously, Cambodia’s reliance on Western aid imposed limits on how far it could go in suppressing its opponents. Flush with Chinese cash, those limits were quickly effaced.

This became clear in 2017, when Hun Sen’s government took the unprecedented steps of banning the CNRP and arresting its new leader Kem Sokha on charges of treason. Hoping to forestall a repeat of 2013, the CPP went on to “win�� all 125 parliamentary seats at elections in July 2018.

Since then, Cambodia has come under a fresh wave of Western pressure to reverse its authoritarian slide. The European Union has begun the process of suspending Cambodia’s tariff-free access to the European markets.

In the US, Cambodia is now viewed almost exclusively in the context of Washington’s escalating tensions with Beijing. A number of bills are currently working their way through Congress, threatening targeted sanctions of various kinds.

Those making such calls risk doubling down on a bankrupt strategy, one that has arguably given Cambodia little choice but to yield to China’s strategic commands, including its alleged demands for exclusive access to its Ream naval base.

Far from leading Hun Sen to distance himself from China, recent pressure has merely deepened the fears and resentments that pushed him towards Beijing in the first place.

As relations reach a crisis point, the time has come for the US and other Western governments to abandon their bankrupt approach towards Cambodia and initiate a reset in relations.

One good starting point would be to jettison the idea that Cambodia is a special “project�� and establish a more realistic balance between the advocacy of democratic principles and broader security concerns.

Officials on both sides need to take swift action to re-establish trust before the relationship is damaged beyond repair.

Published by , July 24, 2019

Four decades on, China’s 1979 border war is officially ‘forgotten�� in Hanoi

Shortly before dawn on Feb. 17, 1979, as the morning mist clung to the jagged rocks of the Sino-Vietnamese frontier, more than 400,000 soldiers of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army swept into northern Vietnam.

At the time, Ly Thi Kham was a 25-year-old private in the People’s Army of Vietnam, which was dug in along the frontier. In a recent conversation at his home in the border town of Dong Dang, the gravel-voiced veteran recalled the serried ranks of PLA soldiers advancing through the dim light, drums pounding and horns blaring.

“They were spread out in rows, and they attacked all together,�� he said, sitting below a faded portrait of himself in his military uniform. “There was smoke everywhere ��and the sky was all bright with cannons.��

Intended to teach Vietnam a “lesson�� for its January 1979 overthrow of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, then a close ally of Beijing, the Chinese invasion led to four weeks of bitter struggle. On March 16 the Chinese troops withdrew, leaving much of the border in ruins. This forgotten sequel to the Vietnam War claimed the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides, along with untold numbers of civilians.

On the Vietnamese side, most of the fallen soldiers came to rest in military cemeteries scattered throughout the northern hills. In September, I visited one such graveyard on a hillside 20 km south of the town of Lang Son. The graves were laid out around a white monument topped with a five-pointed star. Each bore the inscription��liet si��(martyr) above the name of the fallen, and was decorated with a vase of cheery plastic lotus flowers. Many bore dates from February and March 1979.

Lang Son, which saw some of the most intense fighting, has grown into a pleasant town of tree-lined streets and crowded roadside eateries. Markets overflow with Chinese goods shipped through the ironically named Friendship Pass border gate 12 km to the north. Across major roads, decorations are strung: flowers, swooping doves, symbols of peace.

The entrance to a “martyrs�� cemetery�� around 20km south of the town of Lang Son in northern Vietnam.

Yet memories of the conflict remain raw. Local views of the Chinese are sprinkled liberally with the Vietnamese word��tham, meaning “greedy�� or “avaricious.�� For Nguyen Thi Li, an 82-year-old Lang Son resident who was evacuated during the conflict, China would “always have the intention to expand their land. Because they’re a big country, they’ll always want to be bigger.��

Today, Vietnam’s government rarely talks about the border war. After Hanoi and Beijing normalized relations in 1991, ties between the two communist parties improved, their economies became intertwined, and the conflict was scrubbed from official commemorations. In contrast to Vietnam’s wars against the French and Americans, the recent conflict with China poses an awkward challenge for the Communist Party of Vietnam, which is keen to maintain good ties with Beijing. But many ordinary people hear echoes of the war in China’s current policies, especially its aggressive territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Anti-Chinese demonstrations have become a common occurrence in Vietnam over the past decade. They are directed equally against the Vietnamese authorities, which protesters accuse of cozying up to Beijing. To a visitor, the resentment is palpable. “They kowtow: It’s something like the slave and the boss,�� said Anh Chi, a political dissident who has participated in numerous anti-China protests.

The roots of popular hostility toward China run deep and wide. No other nation in Southeast Asia has been so exposed to the expansionary tendencies of its northern neighbor. For nearly a millennium to 938, China ruled northern Vietnam as an imperial province. Subsequently, Vietnamese kings fought off repeated invasions from the north, and resistance to outside domination �� mostly Chinese �� lies at the core of Vietnamese national identity.

One irony is that Vietnam has also benefited from its proximity to China. As the historian Keith Weller Taylor has written, Chinese contributions to Vietnam cover “all aspects of culture, society, and government, from chopsticks wielded by peasants to writing brushes wielded by scholars and officials.�� Indeed, most historians agree that Chinese borrowings gave Vietnamese kingdoms the strength and cohesion necessary to avoid reabsorption by the Chinese empire.

The memorial to fallen soldiers at a “martyrs�� cemetery around 20km south of the town of Lang Son.

These contradictions converge in the question of whether and how the 1979 war should be remembered. At the Museum of Military History in Hanoi, a repository of faded wartime photos and other revolutionary relics, the displays list 13 “Vietnamese Resistance Wars Against Invaders,�� including 11 against armies from China, but are silent on 1979. To its critics, this absence proves the communist party’s capitulation to a hated enemy.

At the same time, Vietnam’s economy remains heavily reliant on trade and investment with China, which, taken together with the historic and ideological ties between the two communist parties, makes good relations imperative. Even as Vietnam has moved to counterbalance Chinese power with increased economic and security ties to the U.S., it has been careful to reassure China. Each step toward Washington has been accompanied by anxious glances in the direction of Beijing.

In normalizing relations with China in 1991, Vietnamese leaders implicitly accepted that their country could not live indefinitely in the shadow of a hostile China. In many ways, this reflects views throughout Southeast Asia, a region fated to sit in disconcerting proximity to the world’s most populous nation.

As a Vietnamese general �� a veteran of the 1979 war —�� told the historian Henry J. Kenny: “We must learn to live with our big neighbor.�� As China’s economic and political power rises, that message should resonate widely throughout the region.

Published in the , March 11-17, 2019

With elections coming, the junta still fears the specter of Thaksin Shinawatra.

CHIANG MAI, Thailand—A specter is haunting Thai politics: the specter of Thaksin Shinawatra.

On Friday, the country’s political scene was upended by the�� that a senior member of the royal family was running in national elections set for March 24. The candidacy of Princess Ubolratana, the eldest sister of King Maha Vajiralongkorn, was news enough: The 67-year-old actress and Instagram star is the first royal to enter party politics since the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932. Much more explosive was who she was representing: a party closely allied to Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck, two former prime ministers who were democratically elected and then ousted in military coups (he in 2006, she in 2014).

The announcement set up an electoral showdown between the magnetic princess and Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, the����former general who has led Thailand since the military’s seizure of power in 2014 and is running as a prime ministerial candidate. But just as Thai observers were digesting the implications of the royal candidacy—Did it violate election laws? Would opponents dare to criticize a member of the royal family?—the king intervened,����that his sister’s entrance into politics was “inappropriate�� and unconstitutional. The pro-Thaksin Thai Raksa Chart party quickly����it would comply with the royal command, and Thailand’s Election Commission on Monday����Ubolratana from running, saying that members of the royal family should be “above politics.�� The bombshell candidacy had lasted barely 48 hours.

With any discussion of the royal family chilled by Thailand’s harsh��, which carries jail terms of up to 15 years for insulting the monarchy, commentary on these remarkable developments by local analysts has been muted. This has not stopped a����, as observers of Thai politics have sifted through the shrapnel searching for answers to the question: What comes next? Pravit Rojanaphruk, an award-winning journalist for Thailand’s��Khaosod News,����Friday as “arguably the most intriguing day since absolute monarchy ended 87 years ago.��

The princess’s announcement has brought back to the surface the bitter enmity that has animated Thai politics for nearly two decades.

��The conflict pits the supporters of Thaksin, a billionaire telecommunications mogul elected to office in 2001, against what one scholar has termed the “��: an enmeshed military-royalist elite that includes senior bureaucrats, Thai aristocrats, and business interests close to the palace.

Looming behind this struggle is the power of King Vajiralongkorn, who acceded to the throne in late 2016, following the death of his father, the revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej. While the monarchy has played a ceremonial role in Thai politics since 1932, the institution wields considerable symbolic power. So far, the Thailand specialist Eugénie Mérieau��, the new king has been more forceful than his father in asserting his royal vetoes and prerogatives, including pushing for changes to the role and composition of the Privy Council, a powerful advisory body, in a bid to assert his power over the “network monarchy�� that surrounds him. (Many Thais assumed that Ubolratana would not have announced her prime ministerial run without her brother’s blessing; his response on Friday indicates that this likely wasn’t the case.)

The princess’s announcement has brought back to the surface the bitter enmity that has animated Thai politics for nearly two decades.

While a military coup in 2006 chased Thaksin from office and into exile, it failed to curtail his wild popularity among rural Thais, whom he had won over with populist policies such as universal health care and access to microloans. Like Banquo’s ghost, Thaksin continues to haunt the banquet of the Thai elites: His proxy parties, backed by his “red shirt�� supporters, have swept the last three general elections, including a����that brought his sister to power in 2011.

When the military seized power in 2014—the 19th����in Thailand since 1932—Prayuth justified the takeover on the grounds that it would stabilize Thai politics, safeguard the monarchy, and bring the people ��.�� Yet in preparing to hold long-awaited elections, Prayuth and his allies face the reality that any free and fair process would likely simply re-elect the latest avatar of the Thaksinite movement. This is one reason the return to civilian rule has������. It also explains some of the actions that Prayuth—a����“soldier with a democratic heart”—has taken during his time in power.

In 2017, the National Council for Peace and Order (as the junta calls itself) wrote and passed a new constitution giving the prime minister��. The constitution gives the junta the right to select the 250 members of the Senate, meaning that Prayuth’s party and its allies����the next prime minister if they win as few as 126 out of the 500 seats up for grabs in the lower house. There are other reasons to doubt a free and fair election on March 24. The U.S.-based organization Human Rights Watch����that Thailand’s media outlets “face intimidation, punishment, and closure if they publicize commentaries critical of the junta and the monarchy, or raise issues the NCPO considers to be sensitive to national security.��

Facing these obstacles, the Thaksin camp’s nomination of a royal family member was a radical—even desperate—bid to out-trump the military-royal alliance. It zeroed in on the main political claim of the junta and its conservative supporters: that they are defending a hallowed throne against the crude, corrupt, and supposedly anti-monarchical sentiments of Thaksin and the red shirts. “This is much more momentous than, say, [Britain’s] Prince Harry running for office,�� Tom Pepinsky, a professor at Cornell University, wrote in a����shortly after the announcement of Ubolratana’s candidacy.

The princess has always been a royal outlier. In 1972, while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she married an American citizen and����her royal titles. As a result, she has largely avoided the ceremonial obligations that occupied the life of her three siblings. She was also not shy about maintaining her ties to Thaksin following his overthrow in 2006; the two were����at the soccer World Cup in Moscow last summer.

If successful, her nomination would have produced an irresistible electoral synthesis, a fusing of royal sanctity to the overwhelmingly rural, working-class populism that propelled Thaksin and his sister to power. Given the political sensitivity surrounding the monarchy, it was also highly risky. “Thaksin took a massive gamble in putting the princess forward as a candidate,�� said George McLeod, a Bangkok-based political analyst.

The gamble now looks likely to backfire. Puangthong Pawakapan, an associate professor at Chulalongkorn University, described Thaksin’s move as a “serious mistake�� and predicted that the Thai Raksa Chart party “is likely facing a dissolution”—possibly under Thailand’s election law, which prohibits parties from employing the monarchy or its imagery in their campaigns. Sure enough, on Sunday, a royalist political activist����that he was filing a petition seeking the party’s dissolution. McLeod said that that junta might also choose to target the Pheu Thai Party, Thaksin’s other electoral vehicle.

The dissolution of either party would inflame further the bitter rivalries of Thai politics, possibly pushing enraged red shirts to return to the streets. “Thaksin’s case to his supporters has always been that they aren’t represented by the elite,�� McLeod said, “and I haven’t seen anything that undercuts that message.�� Even if one of the pro-Thaksin parties were to prevail, it would find itself����of a raft of military-dominated oversight bodies—and of the ever-present threat of monarchical power.

Whatever the result on March 24, it is unlikely to deliver either the democracy desired by many Thais or the stability promised by the junta. “Military rule has brought superficial stability, but many Thais are bitterly resentful of military rule and the political meddling of the palace,�� said Andrew MacGregor Marshall, a journalist and lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University who was the first to break the news of Ubolratana’s candidacy last week. “The dramatic events of Friday have left the country even more polarized than ever.��

Published in , February 12, 2019