Thailand: Electoral redemption or political massacre?

AS the May 14 elections have again demonstrated, Filipinos continue to suffer from the iniquity of an antiquated electoral system, one that is irredeemably prone to cheating and violence, and worse, run by a weak, inept, and tainted poll body.

And while the country agonizingly awaits the final senatorial and party-list tallies three weeks after the elections amid reports of wholesale manipulation of voting results, Thailand’s own electoral politics is being shaken, rightly or wrongly, by a major tremor caused by a much anticipated landmark ruling issued yesterday by its constitutional tribunal.

The verdict, which amounts to a political capital punishment, orders the disbandment of Thai Rak Thai, Thailand’s erstwhile ruling political party, on charges of electoral fraud. It has also meted on 111 of Thai Rak Thai’s executive committee members, among them ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra on exile in London, a five-year ban from engaging in the electoral process.

The decision was handed down by the Constitution Tribunal following almost four months of hearings on the electoral fraud cases faced by five political parties, including Pattana Chart Thai, Thai Ground, Democrat, and Progressive Democratic, in connection with the 2006 snap parliamentary election. (For an extensive background on the case, see The Nation’s special site, The Aftershock.)

Thai Rak Thai was found guilty of bankrolling the candidacies of members of two minor political parties — Pattana Chart Thai and Thai Ground — in the April 2, 2006 election to circumvent the legal requirement that it obtain at least 20 percent of votes cast, given that many of the party’s candidates were running unopposed. It was also found to have helped Pattana Chart Thai rig its membership records.

Talking of corruption, nepotism and cronyism, the nine-man tribunal’s verdict summed it all up: “The Thai Rak Thai Party acted to advance the personal fortune of its leader and tampered with the electoral process in order to grab and cling to power — this is not a genuine party with any ideology.”

The Democrat Party, on the other hand, was accused of conniving with the People’s Alliance for Democracy to topple and frame the Thaksin government for election cheating. Toward the same ends, it was also alleged to have hired candidates from the Progressive Democratic Party to run in the election in Trang, and to have obstructed the candidate registration in Songkhla by hiring the leader of Better Life Party.

The tribunal also ordered the Progressive Democratic Party dissolved, but acquitted the Democrat Party of any wrongdoing.

As an article in The Nation pointed out, the historic verdict’s message was simple: “Political parties that cheat in elections will be dissolved. And their executive members have to bear collective responsibility, otherwise in (the) future they might cheat to win by relying on sacrificial lambs that can be dispensed with.”

To many Thais though, the matter of accepting the verdict is not a simple one.

In fact, if not for vastly changed circumstances in contemporary Thai politics, it would have been easy to hail the decision as a laudable display of political will to punish electoral cheats — something that Filipinos find sorely lacking in their own institutions like the Commission on Elections. After all, the verdict was right in pointing out that most political parties are like Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai — little more than vehicles for the rich and the powerful to launch their political careers.

The Nation editorial even put it rather all too familiarly: “These political parties were started by influential people who had enough money to buy the loyalty of a sufficient number of incumbent members of the House of Representatives so as to ensure their chances of winning a substantial number of seats in Parliament, which would serve as a springboard to political power.”

Only that now Thailand is ruled by a military junta, called the Council for National Security (CNS), and the irony and paradox of it all against this backdrop are not lost on the country’s political analysts and legal minds.

Political historian Thamrongsak Petchlert-anan regarded the verdict as a conclusion to the two-year battle for political power in Thailand. “If the 19 September coup d’etat was aimed at toppling Thaksin, then the last chapter the coup-makers needed was to destroy Thaksin’s root of power — his political party.”

Asked Tulsathit Taptim, editor at The Nation, in his blog: “We are at a strange juncture. Which one is more acceptable — a really murky and self-contradicting Constitution Court verdict that ignored constitutional essence but (was) issued when the country had democracy, or a seemingly better verdict which was delivered under a military regime?”

The previous verdict Tulsathit was referring to involved the Court’s acquittal of Thaksin in the 2001 assets concealment case where the former premier was clearly found to have committed constitutional offenses by hiding company shares in his servants’ accounts, setting up an offshore company, and failing to disclose his assets.

“The rule of law wasn’t respected in the first case, but the Constitution Court made its decision under a democratic atmosphere. This time, the Constitution Tribunal at least tried to be seen as adhering to the rule of law, citing among other things the indisputable evidence of official election data being tampered and money transactions. But yes, it was a tribunal virtually set up by a military that overthrew an elected government.”

But to Pitch Pongsawat, a lecturer at the Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Political Science, what happened last May 30 was nothing but a “bold” demonstration of how Thai society is now “governed by the ‘rule by law’ rather than the ‘rule of law’.”

“That is, the law that is issued by those in political power regardless of how they got into power,” wrote Pitch in an essay published in The Nation. “Since the coup, which was done through military means, was successful, the law issued by the orders of those in power is deemed to be legitimate and the verdict of the Constitution Tribunal, which was brought into existence by the coup-makers, is also regarded as lawful.”

Though not about to absolve the political parties of any wrongdoing, Pitch lamented that all the verdict has achieved was to legitimize the coup, which went against the 1997 Constitution, and to justify using the orders of the coup-makers to punish political parties.

Law professor Prasit Piva-vatthanapanich of Thammasat University echoed the same view, finding the five-year ban “too much,” especially since it was based on the CNS-issued decree.

Such a decision to apply a post-coup law against a crime that was committed prior to its enactment, added Tulsathit, only raises questions regarding criminal justice principles. “(That) no law is supposed to be enacted against any particular group of people with retroactive effects has been disregarded,” he said.

Thai Rak Thai party officials are themselves protesting the use of a revolutionary decree to bar their executives from politics for five years, as well as the legitimacy of the Constitution Tribunal.

Chaturon Chaisang, the party’s caretaker leader, said the verdict only proved that whoever controlled state power could make anything right, even though the power is “achieved through the barrel of a gun.”

The party is getting a lot of sympathy regarding the tribunal’s precedent-setting ruling on collective responsibility. Somchai Preechasilpakul, law dean of Chiang Mai University, argued that separate guilty verdicts should have been set for a political party and its executive members. Though Thai Rak Thai’s executive members clearly committed election fraud, Somchai pointed out that there was “no evidence to say that the party as an institution was guilty too.”

There are those like Chulalongkorn scholar Chaiyan Chaiyaporn who see the tribunal’s verdict in a more positive light, believing that it has in fact set a clearer standard on the rule of law. “I don’t think the coup totally destroyed democracy,” claimed Chaiyan.

The Nation‘s Tulsathit is however not optimistic that Thai democracy won’t be any closer to a long-term cure.

“To begin with, Thailand requires a political system that makes us care — not just when people’s representatives are under threat, but also when key values are. A healthy democracy would make us want to fight when our front lines are breached; an ailing one makes us fight blindly with our backs against the wall.”

He could have addressed that to Filipinos as well.