Thai Protest Leader Pushes a Parallel Government

BANGKOK—Among the temples and boulevards around the city’s Democracy Monument, Thai opposition leader Suthep Thaugsuban, a former deputy prime minister, has begun creating what amounts to a parallel government in Bangkok.

Mr. Suthep on Thursday put forth his ideas on suspending elections and parliament to the country’s business community. In a briefing at the Sukosol Hotel, he explained how his proposals would lead to a cleaner, stronger Thailand than the one presided over by Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and her older brother, former leader Thaksin Shinawatra.

Ms. Yingluck, under pressure from protests by led by Mr. Suthep, has called for new parliamentary elections for Feb. 2, which pro-Shinawatra parties would be expected to win since they have done so with every election since 2000.

“Whoever pushes to have an election, I will do anything to prevent it,” Mr. Suthep vowed, complaining that the Shinawatras and their allies secure votes with promises of subsidies and tax rebates. Ms. Yingluck calls her party’s tactics good politics, adding that they are taking care of poorer Thais.

Mr. Suthep has been seeking credibility by requesting meetings with military and police chiefs, as well as civic groups, to try to gain their support. But the business leaders showed skepticism.

“A lot of [economic recovery] hinges on whether we will have the elections and who will win,” said Thanit Sorat, deputy chairman of the Federation of Thai Industries. “But a bigger question is then, ‘Will there be peace?’ Protesters who disapprove of the vote outcome may come out on the streets again in no time.”
Still, other business leaders seemed comfortable with the chaos on the streets, as long as the standoff remained peaceful. “It’s like the traffic,” says Kriengkrai Thiennukul, also from the Federation of Thai Industries. “You get used to it, and in time you learn to avoid it.”

In recent days, Mr. Suthep has urged authorities to arrest Ms. Yingluck on charges of insurrection for opposing his demonstrations. He has ordered civil servants and the army to take instructions from him rather than the government. Bangkok’s citizens, he says, should set up their own volunteer security forces and ignore the city’s police, while his supporters suggest Ms. Yingluck should leave Thailand to join Mr. Thaksin in self-imposed exile. He was toppled in a military coup in 2006 and lives in Dubai.

But Mr. Suthep faces legal challenges of his own. On Thursday morning, the 64-year-old skipped a court hearing on murder charges related to his role in suppressing a nine-week occupation of central Bangkok by Mr. Thaksin’s supporters in 2010, when he was the country’s deputy leader. More than 90 people were killed.

The prime minister at the time, Abhisit Vejjajiva, also was formally indicted Thursday on murder charges over the 2010 military crackdown. He appeared at the hearing and was released on bail. Both Messrs. Abhisit and Buthep deny wrongdoing.

On the face of it, the state-within-a-state that Mr. Suthep is trying to declare seems to be a grab for political publicity, especially as Ms. Yingluck is still Thailand’s prime minister and appears set to continue as a caretaker until the proposed February elections.

Thanks to strong voter support in Thailand’s densely populated north and northeast for her pro-poor policies, analysts expect Ms. Yingluck to be re-elected and head the latest in a series of so-called Red—the color favored by Mr. Thaksin’s supporters—governments to run Thailand.

But there are tens of thousands of people, many of them from the capital’s middle classes, joining Mr. Suthep and his protest camps in Bangkok, enough to make his brand of brinkmanship a potent force, says Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a professor at Kyoto University.

In many ways the standoff reflects a broader tussle to shape Thailand’s future as the reign of its 86-year-old monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, gradually draws to a close. Few Thais can remember when another monarch sat on the throne, and King Bhumibol has intervened at various crisis points in Thailand’s history to restore order. Questions abound about whether his son, Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn, will have the same authority.

That represents a combustible situation that shows how Thailand—a U.S. ally with an economy that produces everything from disk drives and automobiles to frozen shrimp and footwear—appears locked in a stalemate with no easy solution.

Around lunchtime Thursday, in a further embarrassment for the government, demonstrators cut the power lines to Ms. Yingluck’s main office. She wasn’t there at the time.

“For the last seven years, we have seen Thailand focused nearly wholly on its own existential battle for control of what will be the new political structure after the reign of the revered monarch King Bhumibol,” says Ernest Bower of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “What we are really looking at now is either the eye or the leading edge of the other side of a political hurricane that will define Thailand’s future political landscape.”

At the protest camps in Bangkok, tens of thousands of people converge on mobile stages each evening, with the numbers spiking as high as 200,000 during peak periods.

The rallies take a royalist tone, with many participants saying Mr. Thaksin effectively buys the country’s democracy to undermine the authority of its revered monarchy and uses his sister to run Thailand as his proxy—claims Mr. Thaksin denies. Security guards patrol the perimeter, dressed in black and often wearing yellow bandannas and thick chains of Buddhist talismans. Inside, some protesters have started small businesses in a kind of parallel economy to keep the demonstrations going.

Titacha Chatimakun, 37, says she can make as much as 20,000 or 30,000 baht (some $600 to $900) a day from selling souvenir T-shirts, with her profit netting about a quarter of that. “We’re big fans of Uncle Suthep anyway, but he’s good for business, too,” Ms. Titacha says.

The wild card in Thailand’s drama, though, is whether there will be an election. Mr. Suthep’s allies in the opposition Democrat Party haven’t decided on whether they will participate in February’s vote, or whether they will boycott the election in a bid to drive voter levels to a figure below that required by election laws.
That, said Joshua Kurlantzick at the Council of Foreign Relations, among others, could compel Thai courts to nullify the ballot—and leave the country in an extended state of flux.