By Tim Johnston
Published: Last updated: May 30 2010 19:41
Firemen attempt to put out a blaze lit by anti-government protesters at the Bangkok shopping mall this month. Demonstrations by supporters of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra left scores dead and almost 2,000 woundedIt was a petulant moment of triumph. Ten days ago, hundreds of middle-class volunteers grabbed brooms and detergent to literally – and metaphorically – scrub the taint of months of anti-government demonstrations from the streets of Bangkok.
They rinsed the blood and grime of the farmers and working-class protesters off the tarmac of the Thai capital’s smartest shopping district. But the country has passed into a new and potentially more dangerous political age, as is clear from the burned-out buildings the demonstrators left behind.
Two months of demonstrations, and their violent denouement, have exposed a deep well of resentment over inequalities in political and economic power that have simmered below the surface for years. The unrest, which ended only after the military started shooting, also serves as a warning to other developing countries that even at Thailand’s relatively mature stage of development, the dream of affluence is far from secure.
For decades, Thailand was the exception in south-east Asia. It retained its democracy while neighbours fell to communism or militarism. In a region where heavy-handed state restriction was the norm, its more open economy gave international investors access to the lucrative possibilities of an emerging market.
But in the “land of smiles”, the carefully nurtured façade of social harmony and economic progress hid a widening social and political gulf, and an economic slowdown that has grown harder to gloss over.
Average economic growth in the past decade has been just 4.5 per cent – dwarfed by China’s 10.6 per cent and even Indonesia’s 5.1 per cent. In these figures there is a sense of lost opportunity. Thailand was always going to be the next to follow the path to prosperity blazed by Taiwan and South Korea.
Recently, however, parts of Bangkok looked more like the next Afghanistan. Nine weeks of demonstrations left 88 dead and 1,185 wounded. While the fighting may be over for now, analysts believe that unless protesters’ grievances are addressed, the potential for renewed violence remains.
“The more extremist elements could take matters into their own hands and we may see destabilising attacks – unexplained shootings or bombs – in Bangkok and elsewhere,” says Thitinan Pongsudhirak of Bangkok’s Institute of Security and International Studies. “It may not grow into a full-blown insurgency but, if it is not managed effectively, the pressure will grow for violence.”
For Thailand’s less advanced neighbours, especially those that favour a strong and interventionist state, the lesson is a worrying one: that increasing wealth creates aspirations that will eventually strain a political system unable and unwilling to meet the demands placed on it.
Before the economy began to slow a decade ago, Thailand experienced an unprecedented period of growth. Real incomes more than tripled in the past 30 years, and there were startling improvements in education, health and telecommunications.
But while the paternalism of entrenched and interrelated elites, including aristocrats, bureaucrats and the military, carried Thailand through the early stages of development, today’s problems suggest the political infrastructure has failed to keep pace.
The heterogeneous collection of red-shirted farmers, taxi drivers, cleaners and food stall vendors who spent months sweltering on the streets of central Bangkok were sufficiently affluent to support themselves for weeks without working. However, they felt they deserved a greater share of the spoils of economic development and a greater say in how the country is run.
Thailand is no stranger to political violence – since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932, there have been 11 successful coups, 18 constitutions and 27 prime ministers – but the current conflict is qualitatively different. Past disagreements have been confined largely to establishment circles of the army, politicians and businessmen, all of whom had much to lose if the dispute spread.
This time the dispute involves groups with less to lose and, as outsiders, little incentive to play by the established rules. An increasingly assertive mercantile class enriched by the benefits of globalisation is challenging the the traditional rulers. Represented by Thaksin Shinawatra, the telecommunications billionaire and former prime minister, who now lives in exile, it has discovered that the dormant democratic power of neglected masses can be summoned up to pry the fingers of the establishment off the levers of power.
In mobilising the underclass during his time in office with populist policies such as cheap healthcare, Mr Thaksin and his allies were motivated at least as much by personal interest as by a desire to help. But the process he started has gained its own momentum, instilling in those outside the equation a new sense of their ability to make the political system work for their benefit.
But for farmers and the urban underclass to acquire a greater share of political power and the fruits of economic development, someone else will have to surrender some. And that has set the stage for clashes among interest groups that span the whole of society.
“There are the poor who have sensed the potential of politics for improving their position; the richer who fear losing long-enjoyed privileges; many ordinary people who resent the power (and corruption) of the bureaucracy; a growing provincial middle class that resents the excessive domination of Bangkok; and other divisions,” Pasuk Phongpaichit, a liberal economist, said in a recent paper.
The demonstrators believe that the organs of democracy – the judicial system and parliament, as well as the army – have been co-opted by their foes in the establishment.
As evidence they present their serial disenfranchisement – first by the military, which removed Mr Thaksin in a coup in 2006, then by the courts, which disqualified two pro-Thaksin prime ministers in succession – one of them for taking payment for appearing on a television cooking show.
Finally, the protesters cite parliamentary sleight of hand, with a political faction once loyal to Mr Thaksin enticed 16 months ago to defect to the coalition of establishment prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, handing him power.
They believe that street protests are the only way of making their voices heard.
“The elections gave a mandate to the people we wanted and they robbed it from us,” says Sayan Chanakiatpaisarn, a red-shirt regional organiser.
Compounding the protesters’ sense of disenfranchisement is a widening wealth gap. Such gaps are a feature of developing economies – some people are faster to grasp emerging opportunities than others. But, in most, imbalances tend to stabilise and then narrow as development progresses.
However, Thailand’s position on the Gini index that measures inequality on a scale of 0 to 100, which is absolute inequality, is 53.5 – up from 42 eight years ago and substantially higher than neighbouring countries.
There is clear evidence that some leading members of the establishment, particularly younger, more cosmopolitan members such as Mr Abhisit and Korn Chatikavanij, the finance minister, believe the country must move towards greater inclusiveness, but even they seem to share the belief of their class that they retain a monopoly on political good sense.
To be fair, the behaviour of some leading members of the opposition, from the autocracy of Mr Thaksin while in office to the violent militancy of Arisman Pongruangrong, a protest leader who suggested each demonstrator bring a litre of petrol to Bangkok to burn the city if their demands were not met, has not bolstered faith in the political maturity of the red shirts and their allies.
But the assumption of the establishment that it has a duty to hold on to power, if only to prevent the mob from taking over, is in turn the prime motivating force for the anti-government movement.
Mr Abhisit has chosen short-term suppression in the hope that his vision of reform – including a more progressive tax system and social welfare programmes – can mitigate the anger of the underclass that became so apparent in Bangkok. He has also said that proposed November elections cannot take place before the implementation of a broader reconciliation programme. But there are no guarantees that he can get the necessary policies past the more reactionary elements among his allies, or that the poor will have the patience to wait for the results.
Bangkok’s well-heeled army of volunteer street-cleaners may yet find itself called to action again.
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MARKETS
Foreign investors take Thailand’s political turmoil in their stride
Foreign investors have barely flinched at the sight of the blood in the streets of central Bangkok. But their calm has less to do with courage than with a rational review of the risks and rewards of investing in Thailand – and by extension in other Asian emerging markets.
Admittedly, foreign investors have sold $1.8bn worth of Thai equities this month, including the tense days in the middle of May, when more than 50 people were killed as troops broke up the anti-government demonstration in the capital. This has cancelled out big inflows earlier in 2010 and leaves foreigners net sellers for the year to date to the tune of more than $630m.
But with foreigners accounting for about a quarter of the turnover in a market capitalised at about $180bn, the withdrawal is hardly a rout. By comparison, foreign investors took nearly $5bn out of the market in 2008 when the global financial crisis struck.
Moreover, this month’s sell-off has been prompted more by the current global turmoil, triggered by the eurozone’s troubles, than by Thai politics. In the general flight to safety from emerging markets, Thailand has stood up fairly well. The market is back where it was at the end of December, compared with a 10.8 per cent drop in the MSCI index of Asia excluding Japan.
“What is of most concern to investors is what is going on in the developed world. In emerging markets, even where things are happening, as in Thailand, investors are prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt,” says Philip Poole, global head of emerging markets research at HSBC, the UK bank.
Investors are willing to indulge Thailand in particular because of its long record of economic growth, not least during the successive political crises of recent years. They do not wish to pull out of one of the most open and investor-friendly of east Asia’s fast-growing export-led economies, whose government has within the past month raised its 2010 gross domestic product forecast from an increase of 3.3-5.3 per cent to 4.3-5.8 per cent.
Officials are still counting the cost of the damage done by the protesters, and the effect on tourism and on manufacturing industries that suffered from supply breaks and stoppages.
Honda and Toyota, for example, two of the country’s largest investors, have had to cut shifts at their facilities north of Bangkok because of the government curfew in the capital and 23 other provinces.
However, the bulk of the damage has been to the tourism sector, which accounts for 6.5 per cent of GDP, and a narrow spectrum of retailers and hotel owners that had assets around the main protest sites. The Tourism Authority of Thailand estimates that the protests will cost the industry Bt5120bn in lost revenue.
Estimates of the total cost of the protests stand at about 0.5 of a percentage point of GDP. That is significant but it is a loss investors are ready to forgive in an economy that recorded a 12 per cent increase in the first quarter.
In addition, the country’s financial position is sound. After the 1998 Asian financial crisis, Thailand cut its foreign debt, which now stands at $66bn or a modest 25 per cent of GDP, while foreign currency reserves are more than $140bn.
Fund managers today are also ready to take political upheaval in their stride, says Kevin Grice, of Capital Economics, who has covered emerging markets for 20 years, because they “are more knowledgeable and take a more calibrated approach. That is why waves of contagion are diminishing over time.”
Two decades ago investors saw Thailand as exotic but – because access to other countries, notably China, was heavily restricted – as one of the few ways of boarding the east Asian economic juggernaut. So fund managers paid more attention to every Bangkok cough or sneeze.
In the past two decades, however, they have witnessed political shocks in several states, including Indonesia, South Korea and the Philippines, as well as Thailand. They have come to believe that it will take an awful lot of politics to upset the mighty east Asian economic machine.
Stefan Wagstyl and Tim Johnson
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.
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