As Thailand's prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, settles into his second term, he has put out signals that his style of government might be kinder and gentler than the previous term.
On Monday, Mr Thaksin received a list of 48 nominations for a 'National Reconciliation Committee', chaired by former prime minister Anand Panyarachun, which will devote itself to finding solutions to the violence racking Thailand's southern provinces. Today, the Thai parliament will begin its first joint session in more than a decade to debate the insurgency.
But will a so-called reconciliation committee - the brainchild of the opposition Democrat Party - come up with any practical solutions to what seems like an intractable problem in a highly political environment? And will Thailand's famously brash prime minister really listen to his political rivals?
Mr Thaksin's critics don't think so. They accuse him of paying lip service to such committees to score political points. Many expect the prime minister to charge ahead with his authoritarian agenda in his second term.
One of the prime minister's most outspoken critics, Kavi Chongkittavorn, a senior editor of The Nation newspaper, says Mr Thaksin is 'a leader in a hurry' with little use for the proclamations of feel-good committees. Mr Chongkittavorn says former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad and former senior minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew - both to whom Mr Thaksin is sometimes compared as a potential 'benevolent dictator' - had decades to profoundly reshape their societies.
He says Mr Thaksin has had only one four-year term, with a second having begun on March 14, and he will waste little time sharing the spotlight with his rivals. But reshaping Thai society is exactly what Mr Thaksin aims to do, and the two reins by which he has steered Thailand have been the military and the media.