Published: June 14 2011 17:16 | Last updated: June 14 2011 17:16
‘I always like to be the underdog’: Abhisit Vejjajiva, Thai prime minister, faces a tight race next month, according to polls
Thailand’s beleaguered prime minister is facing potential defeat in next month’s elections at the hands of a man who has not set foot in the country for more than three years.
The July 3 ballot has become a referendum on the legacy of Thaksin Shinawatra, the controversial former prime minister who lost office in a 2006 military coup and now lives in Dubai to avoid a two-year sentence for corruption.
Despite his exile, Mr Thaksin, a telecommunications billionaire, has maintained an iron grip on the opposition Puea Thai, which is leading in opinion polls. Last month he engineered the appointment of his younger sister, Yingluck, as the party’s prime ministerial candidate.
But in an interview with the Financial Times on Tuesday, Abhisit Vejjajiva, the Eton and Oxford-educated prime minister, came out swinging, warning that a vote for the opposition Puea Thai party could extend the country’s already long record of political instability and accusing the party of misleading the electorate.
“There is a risk of instability. And you just have to ask why, as political parties, as representatives of the people, do you want to risk the country’s future just to whitewash one man?” he told the FT.
Mr Abhisit’s repeated warnings that Puea Thai’s push to clear the way for Mr Thaksin’s return could lead to further problems has become a regular mantra for the prime minister, which some interpret as a warning and others as a threat.
Rise to power
Abhisit Vejjajiva, 46, is the scion of a long line of doctors with connections to Thailand’s royal family. He was born in Newcastle, England, where his father was practising medicine, and went on to attend Eton and Oxford.
He became leader of the Democrat party in 2005, when it was in opposition.
He won the premiership in December 2008 in a parliamentary vote called after the pro-Thaksin government was dissolved by court order.
He is married to Pimpen Sakuntabhai, a lecturer. They have two children.
But Mr Abhisit is right that Mr Thaksin is at the heart of Thailand’s deep political divisions. Loved by his supporters for policies such as cheap healthcare and village loans, he is loathed by the country’s powerful establishment, who accuse him of corruption and hijacking the country’s democracy.
Those divisions were behind the 2006 coup that unseated Mr Thaksin. But they have refused to go away, and in April and May of last year they exploded into violence when the army moved in against thousands of Thaksin supporters who had taken over swaths of central Bangkok. At least 91 people died and almost 2,000 were injured in eight weeks of demonstrations.
Mr Thaksin has not hidden his agenda. He has described Mrs Yingluck, a political neophyte who until three weeks ago ran a property development company, as his “clone”. Some of her less charitable critics have dubbed her “Thaksin in a frock”, although she is substantially more photogenic than her brother.
Most of Thailand’s notoriously unreliable polls have the Democrats trailing Puea Thai – which translates as For Thais – and Mr Abhisit admitted that his party are 3-4 percentage points behind.
But he insisted that could serve as an advantage on the campaign trail. “They look OK to me,” he said of the polls. “It’s a tight race and I always like to be the underdog: it makes your people work harder.”
Mr Abhisit accused Puea Thai of camouflaging an agenda to rehabilitate Mr Thaksin behind populist promises such as a 40 per cent rise in the minimum wage and a tablet computer for every high school student.
“What is becoming more and more of a concern is that Puea Thai is still very much centred around the idea of amnesty and whitewashing Thaksin. It is not the country’s nor the people’s priority,” Mr Abhisit said.
“They want their economic problems, particularly in terms of high prices, addressed; they want to see issues like drugs being one of the top concerns. The last thing they want to see is more conflict and controversy surrounding proposals like that.”