The Thai national election to elect 480 MPs is due on December 23, the day when in India all attention will be focussed on who will win elections in Gujarat. People will directly vote to elect 400 MPs, while 10 from each of the eight provinces of Thailand will be elected through the party list.

The election is important for restoring democracy, kept in suspension since September 2006, when the military led a coup against then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra when he was away in New York at the UN General Assembly.

There have been several coups in the past in Thailand, but this bloodless military coup was different. In general, people supported the coup, apparently fed up with Thaksin’s alleged corruption.

The coup leaders led by General Sonthi called themselves the Council for National Security (CNS) and charged Thaksin with corruption, nepotism, causing divisiveness, and insulting the king. Following this, the Constitutional Tribunal dissolved Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party, which had won two successive national elections. Not only that, the tribunal banned 111 TRT members, including Thaksin, from participating in Thai politics for five years.

But interestingly, the recent Thai elections are about nothing but being pro- or anti-Thaksin. It is likely to be a referendum on whether people still like Thaksin.

The two main parties in this election are the People’s Power Party (PPP), which had come up after the dissolution of TRT, and the Democratic Party, the oldest in Thai elections. The PPP is seen as the new avatar of the dissolved TRT, since it has the tacit support of Thaksin. Besides, there are other smaller parties, like the Chart Thai, Puea Pandin, and Pracaharaj Party, which have pockets of influence but are unlikely to win. They can, however, play an important role if no party manages to win a majority of seats necessary to form the government.

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