Generals’ election: Thai politics

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Dozens of people have been killed in the past 10 days as Russia has intensified its bombing in Idlib, Syria's last rebel stronghold. Russia's campaign has often proved brutal. But it feels it's won an important victory in Syria and has emerged from the conflict more confident and more influential in the Middle East. And our correspondent drops in on a poetry group in Guinea-Bissau. Amid a tangle of languages, she finds that some of the most prolific authors are hardened military men. First up, though, it was billed as a return to democracy. In March, the people of Thailand voted in a general election for the first time since a military coup in 2014. But it seems that the generals who seized power back then have done their level best to keep hold of it.

So it's been an exceptionally busy week in Thailand, and on Saturday it was the start of 3 days of celebrations for King Maha Vajiralongkorn's coronation.

Miranda Johnson is our Southeast Asia correspondent.

The really busy time was on Sunday when I camped out for hours in this sweltering heat with thousands of other Thai people, all wearing yellow as that is the royal color, to see the royal procession go past. It was all extremely regal, and it was amazing to see how dedicated people were to being there despite the extraordinary heat. And if that weren't enough for the start of the new reign, it has also got off to a fairly explosive beginning politically, because in recent days the full results of a general election held in March were released. And the election was a bit of a sham. It was stage-managed and designed to keep the ruling military junta in power.

Well, walk us through that a little bit.

In what way was it a sham and stage-managed?

So Paling Pracharat, which is a party created to support the military junta that came to power in a coup in 2014, sought to win over Pheu Thai, which is a party loyal to Thaksin Shinawatra, who is a former prime minister who's basically been feuding with the generals since an earlier coup in 2006, which saw him kicked out of office. And the junta rigged the electoral system in its favor, banning all political activity just until just a few months before the election, disbanding a second party linked to Mr. Thaksin, and then also awarding itself the power to appoint all 250 members of the upper house. So in March, Thais voted to fill the 500 seats in the lower house. And despite all of this, just after the vote, a coalition of 7 opposition parties who oppose the military and oppose running the country, which includes Perti and also a new party called Future Forward, which is popular with young voters. These 7 opposition parties announced that they had won a slim majority in the lower house according to their forecasts.

So against all the odds then, the sort of coalition of opposition parties seem to have grabbed some of the power, at least in the lower house where there was actually some power up for grabs. But will they actually have a voice? It sounds as if the junta has tried to wrap this up pretty tightly.

Yes. And so first time around, I think the junta realized it didn't wrap things up tightly enough. And so what has happened this week with the announcement of the full results is that the election commission revealed that Pheu Thai won the most seats in the lower house, followed by the military-linked Palang Pracharat Party, and then with Future Forward in third place, which is also an opposition party. But the biggest blow to the opposition came when the Election Commission tweaked the formula whereby it allocated 150 party list seats, which are awarded on a proportional basis. And that meant that the party list seats given to big parties such as Future Forward was reduced, and instead little opposition parties got some of those seats instead. So the changes reduced the opposition alliance to having a minority in the lower house of 245 seats, whereas they were hoping for a very slim majority.

So the junta has, after the fact, then gone in and essentially rigged things even further in its favor.

I mean, what's the upshot?

Will these opposition parties actually have a voice in the eventual legislature?

No. And right now it looks as though a weak pro-military coalition government is the most likely outcome, probably with the general who's currently prime minister once again leading it.

So this new sort of gently reshuffled government, what will its priorities be?

So some of them will be similar to the priorities that the the current military government has shown. In particular, it will continue to defend and uphold the interests of the monarchy. It's also likely that the new government will come down hard on Future Forward. Already the party and its, its leadership face 16 charges of wrongdoing, and they're fighting those in various ways. But it will not be in the interests of the king for there to be messy disorder so early in his reign. And so the junta will probably come down quite hard, quite fast on anyone it thinks is causing dissent.

You keep mentioning the Future Forward Party, which is not one that we've spoken about before when talking about Thai politics. Are they an important new force?

Yes. So they were founded about a year ago by a young charismatic auto parts billionaire, and they appealed particularly to young people, and their policy platform was progressive. Progressive. It was a sort of anti-establishment. They want to do things like cut back the military budget. And so, as you can imagine, they ruffled some feathers. They're also anti-monopoly when it comes to business. And they really captured hearts and minds of young people who are tired of the old feuds in Thailand between Pheu Thai and Mr. Thaksin and the royal and military establishment.

What will the members of Future Forward and indeed everybody else make then of this stage-managed election, this sort of visible fiddling with the incipient democracy?

So it's very disappointing in many ways because Thailand, particularly a couple of decades ago, was considered a bit of a democratic leader in Southeast Asia. And so for Thailand to fall behind now, particularly as a crackdown in Cambodia is occurring, as violence continues to rage in Myanmar, It suggests that the region can no longer look to the country to be a guiding light when it comes to democratic rights and human rights.

Miranda, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

Today is Victory Day in Russia. Every year, fireworks fireworks burst over Moscow to commemorate the defeat of Nazi Germany. When Joseph Stalin was celebrating that victory, he sent a train on a tour of Russia full of Nazi military paraphernalia. And last month, cheered by military cadets and marching bands, another train pulled into a station outside Moscow. This one had also toured the country, laden with military trophies from Russia's campaign in Syria.

They're fighting not against some jokers, but against people with serious technical capabilities— tanks, armored vehicles, and mortars. I think they did the right thing sending this train around. It's interesting for those who didn't serve in the army to see it.

Anton Sidorov is a Navy veteran who brought his 4-year-old son along.

I supported the war from the beginning. Terrorism doesn't happen here in our country. We have to battle terrorism there.

Russia intervened in Syria in 2015. Its ally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, had been weakened by an armed rebellion. Islamic State was rampant. Russia still carries out bombing campaigns in support of Mr. Assad. In recent days, scores have been killed as Syria and Russia intensified raids in the north of the country. Back in 2015, some thought it unwise for Russia to wade into a messy conflict. But the gamble appears to have paid off.

Russia's intervention in Syria in 2015 has transformed its position in the Middle East.

Anton La Guardia is The Economist's digital editor and was recently reporting in Russia.

It not only saved its ally Bashar al-Assad, but it showed that it could intervene and indeed seemingly succeed where the Americans had failed in Iraq. And it has become a kingmaker in Syria and you're seeing a return of Russia to the affairs of the Middle East.

But Russia had been active in the Middle East in the past.

It has a history of being involved in the Middle East since Tsarist times. It saw itself as a protector of Orthodox Christianity in the Arab world. In the Cold War, they backed the Arab cause against Israel and supported a number of radical regimes Then, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, they more or less pulled away. They watched from the sidelines as Americans exerted hegemony, mediated the Arab-Israeli conflict, presided over Oslo. They were bystanders and I think you sense in Moscow now quite a lot of pleasure at the fact that now it's the Americans who must watch as the Russians, the Turks, and the Iranians negotiate among themselves the future of Syria.

Why did Russia choose, after all that time on the sidelines, to intervene in Syria?

Well, we don't know exactly. I think first of all, it saw that Bashar al-Assad was potentially about to fall. The rebels were making— were getting close to Damascus and to his heartland. I think they feared that Syria would become some kind of jihadist stronghold and I spoke to Fyodor Lukyanov, a think tanker in Moscow. Who said this to me?

Russia always had a conceptually different approach to not just Syria, but to all such kind of crisis situations, different than Americans, for example, because Americans believed that change of authoritarian, corrupted, unsuccessful regimes was a way to strengthen stability in the region. While Russian very deep-rooted position has always been, it doesn't matter what kind of regime, you should strengthen existing regimes because the only alternative to them is chaos.

And I think most important, the Russians felt cornered at the time. They were under sanctions and isolated after the annexation of Crimea and the undeclared war they had waged in eastern Ukraine and I think they wanted some cards that they could trade with the Americans, that they wanted to talk to the Americans about more than just Ukraine. And I think they probably surprised themselves by how well things went for them.

So you speak of a successful campaign in Syria. I mean, to what extent? How did they accomplish that?

I should hasten to add that it's a success from their point of view at terrible humanitarian cost to Syrians themselves. Now, I think they saw— they watched Americans in Iraq and they saw what a debacle that became, so they decided they're not going to put ground forces in, so they limited themselves to air power. They were fortunate in that they had local allies on the ground, the Syrian army, Iranian forces, and Hezbollah from Lebanon. They also resorted to ruthless tactics of a sort that were tried out in Chechnya. They essentially resorted to depopulation tactics that the Syrian regime was already enacting. They appeared to have been indiscriminate in their use of bombing, and human rights groups accuse them of deliberately targeting humanitarian facilities, hospitals. And moreover, they also protected the regime from accusations, well-founded by subsequent investigators, that they used chemical weapons. So cynicism and ruthlessness of a sort that no Western government could apply was probably part of their military success. Whether that helps them create stability and a lasting political settlement among people who have been treated so brutally is an entirely different matter.

And what's Russia got out of it, this sort of surprise dividend in terms of regional influence or new alliances?

A number of things. First of all, its diplomatic centrality. Unusually, it can speak to all sides of all the various regional rivalries. It can talk to both the Iranians and the Israelis. It can talk to the Saudis and the Qataris. It can talk to the Turks and the Kurds. At different times in its history, it's had relations with all of these countries. You know, beyond Syria, the Russians seem to have an entry with all the main players. They also seem to have a number of arms deals and I think perhaps the most striking thing has been the oil deal that the Russians did with the Saudis. Traditionally, OPEC didn't really speak to Russia very much about oil production limits to try and control the price. Suddenly, after the intervention in Syria, the Saudis and the Russians cut a deal to reduce oil output, raise the prices to the benefit of both sides. Russia's position has become much more active, much more visible. Some people think it's a counterweight to the Americans. That may be too optimistic to think, but nevertheless, there is certainly a hedge. Countries are hedging against what they see as an unpredictable America.

But in terms of Russia stepping into America's shoes in terms of alliances, they're not a one-for-one replacement, right? Doesn't care about human rights. It props up autocracies, doesn't fight for democracy.

So that's one of its advantages in a region that dislikes being dictated to about democracy. Vladimir Putin doesn't ask awkward questions about such things and he has a common view as most of the regimes of the Arab world that what is important is stability, not democracy. They see the Americans as having abandoned Hosni Mubarak, the dictator of Egypt during the Arab Spring and they see Vladimir Putin standing up for as vile a leader as Bashar al-Assad in Syria and they like that and they say he can be relied upon. He does what he says and he says what he means and that's great for us.

And what about Russia sort of beyond the Middle East, kind of in a global role? Do you think the Middle East is a model for the way they want to run things more widely?

I think the most interesting move that they've made has actually been in Latin America where the US government accuses Russia of convincing Nicolás Maduro not to leave the country when faced with an incipient coup, which subsequently failed. And you see Russia in the name of stability and non-interference cast itself almost as a sort of mirror image of former American presidents who wanted to push democracy around the world. So the Russians are now the champions of global autocracy.

Antón, thank you very much for coming in.

Thank you.

In the tiny West African country of Guinea-Bissau, the legacy of Portuguese control and the failures of the ruling party have left the country desperately poor. But one thing it's rich in is poetry, especially among military men with stories to tell.

I'd heard a lot about Guinea-Bissau. Guinea-Bissau's literary scene. I live in, in Dakar in Senegal, and it's a neighboring country, but it has a reputation as much more freewheeling, open place. They have carnival, they have a lot of Brazilian traditions there.

Jennifer Romani recently reported from Guinea-Bissau for The Economist.

And I had heard about this, this group of poets and writers who, although they live in a country with no functioning state-run library, in a place where it's very hard to get hold of books, were very popular and broadcast on the radio.

And so where did you go to learn more?

Well, I'd heard that every month all the poets, writers, folk musicians of Bissau gathered at the university to share new work, to have a chat, to gossip a little bit about what they'd been doing for the previous month. And it was there that I met Adetshi Semedo. Who is also a— in addition to being a poet, she's also a government spokeswoman. So there was this sort of interesting dynamic that I then discovered through quite a lot of the other people that I met, that they had an extremely serious day job that they then combined with being a love poet or with writing poems about the environment.

How do you mean? What other sorts of people did you meet?

Well, I also met a lot of soldier poets. So Bissau also has some problems with its military. They've been involved in drug trafficking. And in allowing cartels entry into the country. I didn't meet any of those, but I met a lot of soldiers who dealt with this problem in their work. So one of the soldier poets I met was Manuel da Costa, who writes poetry, but he's also written a novel which was published in Portugal called Mare Branca em Bolívia. Bolivia is a small West African country which has a lot of problems with drug trafficking and with drug cartels overrunning the country and working in cahoots with the military, which sounds quite a lot like what has happened in Guinea-Bissau.

It passes for different—

Manuel himself said that he'd seen this a lot when he was in the military, and it was a problem he felt had really eroded trust in the armed forces.

Is there a kind of a long tradition of this sort of military poetry crossover?

So actually, the murdered guerrilla leader Amílcar Cabral, who's really revered in Guinea-Bissau as the man who achieved independence from Portugal, was also a well-known poet. And that combination of warrior spirit and intellectual craftsmanship is still very deeply respected. And that was really reflected in One of the poets that I met, Samuel Fernandes, he actually borrowed a title from one of Cabral's poems, Regresso, and wrote his own version of that work in which he speaks about people leaving Guinea-Bissau to go and live in better places. And he's lamenting that feeling and that drive, especially among young people. So this part of the poem was something I felt really got to the heart of what Fernandes was trying to say in this poem.

Vamos regressar à pátria, mas porque o amor pátrio é maior que sumtuosos edifícios, lindas avenidas e carros modernos.

Let's go back home because love of country is better than beautiful buildings, pretty avenues, and modern cars.

Jennifer, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/radiooffer. 12 issues for $12 or £12. See you back here tomorrow.

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