This is a class warfare, where the filth* who finally got acknowledged as people not serfs had elected multiple governments that the elites have overthrown time and time again.
The “wise men” is getting old and is in bad health, the military leader did his kneel in front of a picture. The son of the “wise men” is getting ready to take over the royal family a son who favors Thaksin.
In a general way, not precise maybe not even accurate 100% this is how it has worked the last few decades. Corruption more corruption and well more corruption. Now lets throw some corruption that elects someone who helps the poor rural folks. HOLY SHIT there is corruption must stamp it out NOW!
I apologize about the “filth” comments, the dehumanizing of the red shirts a.k.a. the poor done by Siam Sam in here must be seen and understood. When you are “above” someone, want to see them murdered, encourages it openly first you must dehumanize your fellow man.
2: The poor rural areas overwhelmingly vote for the “filth” *
That’s Thaksin’s PR spin, his power base is the North and North East thanks to buying up the pre-existing patronage network on those regions, the South is full of poor people and they don’t vote for his parties.
They did get a lot of votes by promising Heaven on Earth to rice farmers though, too bad their Rice Scheme policy, predictable, ended up in disaster and more misery for those that believed them.
The “Class War” narrative is simply propaganda, the very first thing the previous government did was reduce corporate taxes by 30 per cent. How proletariat of them.
Your understanding of how vote buying works is very shallow and reading a couple articles on it won’t give you any great insights.
Handing out money to people at election time is just a small facet of it, someone already mentioned buying up village leaders to sway the votes, my own GFs father is a village chief, after the last election he had to go into hiding for a few days because he couldn’t “deliver” the village to the buyer as arranged and he was warned a hitman was after him. That’s Thai “Democracy” for you’
Those shenanigans seem to go unnoticed by election observers that are parachuted in on election day.
If you want another example of how vote buying works let one of Thaksin’s (we can skip Yingluck as being immaterial) ministers explain it to you:
Speaking in the Chiang Mai Gymnasium at a political event called “Pheu Thai for the Future of Thailand”, he said, “I don’t want to do it [the convention centre in Phuket]. Why? Any problem? We will do it in the future when the people of Phuket see the good side of us and elect our man.
As for the last part of your post, the ones murdering people were the Red Shirts, and they even cheered at it:
Two children were murdered in that attack.
Mind you, that was a gathering of Red Shirt local leaders. I, for one, don’t have any problem whatsoever with calling such people filth.
Thank you, Ale. I could not have said it better myself. It’s amazing how people with absolutely no experience with or in a particular situation can so strongly “know” exactly the right course. The filth get a lot of backers this way.
The majority of this thread is a military rule love-fest. However, Siam Sam, Ale, and the like, acknowledge that democracy, or more likely democracy lite, will be restored sometime in the near future.
Yes, that was a given anyway. It goes to the king for endorsement today (Friday), and that will be the start of the Prayuth era.
There are a lot of hopes for him. He really has cleaned up a lot of the scams and corruption in the past three months, and foreign investors have started coming back. Before May 22, Thailand was on the verge of collapse.
I was disappointed. The 1991 junta selected Anand, one of the best PM’s in Thailand’s history. But I don’t know if there was an alternative. The country may be too polarized to find a “neutral” civilian. Anand himself is now 82 years old.