Thailand's 19th coup underscores country's fatal flaw

Since 1932, when the absolute monarchy was abolished, Thailand has had 25 general elections and 19 coups d'tat, 12 of them successful.

In terms of regime changes, I suppose this makes Thailand a democracy by a slim margin.

"Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe," Winston Churchill told the British House of Commons in 1947. "Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms."

He might have added that democracy is only better than all those other forms of government when people accept the results.

It is in the nature of elections that not everyone likes the outcome. There are winners and losers, and sometimes the winners are people with troubling views and backgrounds.

The month of May gave us two cases in point the victory in India of Narendra Modi, a former state governor whose role in the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 is still open to question; and the election a few days later of numerous candidates with bigoted,jingoistic platforms to the European Parliament.

In between those two events the Thai army staged the nineteenth of its coups, revealing once again the fatal flaw in a country that is often enthusiastically, but wrongly, described as one of Asia's most vibrant, even robust, democracies.

The aging king

Still, it is true to say that the Thai people enjoy many freedoms and participate enthusiastically in multi-party politics, but the country's elections have become empty carnivals.

Political leaders and groups at both ends of the increasingly polarized political spectrum simply won't accept the results, and take their refusal out on to the streets.

The army's frequent interventions in Thai politics have had a varietyof motives, but the justification is usually the same: the military had to step in to restore order, give squabbling politicians a time-out, and rearrange the constitution so that this never has to happen again.

When it turns out, to no one's surprise, that the soldiers are not very good at running the country, they eventually hand power back to the civilians, and say they will not intervene again. Until next time.

The constant in this flux has always been the Thai monarchy, with its unique ability to impose restraint on politicians and the army alike. The revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej is 86 and has been kingsince June 1946, succeeding his older brother who died mysteriously from a gunshot wound.

I was in Bangkok in 1992, when the King resolved a previous crisis known as Black May.

Dozens of people had been killed as the army tried to control huge demonstrations during a power struggle between the then prime minister SuchindaKraprayoonand the opposition leader Chamlong Srimuang.

After four days of chaos, television programs were interrupted for a broadcast from the palace. The politicians were kneeling on the floor being scolded by His Majesty.

"I ask you not to confront each other but to work together to end the current violence," said the King, and the streets emptied instantly. The crisis was over.

Which side the generals?

Of course, Thailand's royal mystique can be used in this way only very occasionally if it is to retain its authority, and its absence in the current turmoil could cost the country dearly.

At 86, the King is too frail to act, which means that the stakes today are higher than ever the winners will probably be in power when the King dies, and the succession takes place.

The heir to the throne, 62-year-old Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, has a reputation as an unpredictable libertine with a lavish lifestyle. He will never be regarded the same reverence as his father.

It is also too soon to judge the intentions of the new military junta, which is calling itself the National Council for Peace and Order.

But it is unlikely to be an impartial referee between the two powerful groups in Thai politics, named after the colour of their shirts red and yellow.

Strip away the colour coding, the personalities and the ever-changing alphabet soup of organizations and parties, and you find a familiar political divide. Rice farmers, peasants and workers on the red side, the moneyed class and aristocrats on the yellow.

An added wrinkle is that the red machine is the creation of a telecoms billionaire, Thaksin Shinawatra, who has lived in exile in Dubai since being deposed by the military while out of the country in 2006.

In the early 2000s he won successive elections with a program of subsidies, loans, and cheap health care that was wildly popular withpoorer Thais.

His influence from exile remains decisive, as his sister Yingluk wonthe last election in 2011, and would easily win again, say analysts, if a new election were held tomorrow.

The yellow alliance brings together royalists, who think Thaksin was too big for his boots, and the urban elite, who are often frank in their bewilderment that the votes of peasants, drivers and maids have a value equal to their own.

When the red majority has prevailed, the yellows have taken to the streets to shut the capital down.

When the yellows have managed to use institutions such as the courts and the electoral commission to get the reds removed, then the reds, in their turn, resort to the politics of the street.

In the twilight of the world's longest-reigning monarchy, divisions betweenrich and poor are worse than ever, and the heir to the throne is an unpopular playboy prince believed to have business ties with an exiled tycoon Thaksin scheming to come home.

With so much wealth and power at stake, it is very possible that this time the generals may not be acting with the interests of their divided nation at heart, but their own.