Thailand's class war has been contained, for now
Thailand's prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, was humiliated last weekend when red-shirted protesters overran the summit of Asian leaders he was hosting, but now he is back in control. The 'reds' have been driven off the streets of Bangkok by the army, and the 'yellows' who fought them last year have not come out in force, either. Peace has been restored, for now.
It sounds as arcane as the street battles of the blues and greens in Byzantium 15 centuries ago. It certainly doesn't sound like modern politics. But it is (apart from the coloured T-shirts) a great deal like 19th century European politics.
Thailand's democracy is less than 20 years old, and it was the growing middle class that made it happen - just as it was the middle class in Europe that made the revolutions happen there in the 1800s. In both cases, they were doing it for themselves, not for the poor.
What the middle class were after was mainly political equality, since they were already doing quite nicely economically. But no sooner had they won it than they discovered to their horror that the poor were also infected by this idea of equality.
Either they made a political deal that brought the poor into the system economically, or they lived forever in fear of the day when the angry poor broke into their homes.
Most of the former colonial countries inherited the democratic system. They didn't all make the system work, but at least they knew the rules, including how to get the poor to accept the system. But, Thailand, almost uniquely in southern Asia, was never colonised.
In 1992, middle-class Thais, overwhelmingly Bangkok-based, drove the army from power in a non-violent revolution that brought real democracy for the first time.
Give a country a democratic system, and pretty soon the poor will figure out how to use it for their own purposes. Their leader and voice in Thailand was Thaksin Shinawatra, a former policeman who became a telecommunications billionaire. He was a demagogue, but he genuinely did represent the poor.
Thaksin won power in 2001, and began pushing through measures to give the poor access to cheap loans, medical care and other things that the middle class took for granted.
Thaksin was overthrown by the army in 2006 and his party banned. When democracy was restored, the poor voted for his allies and the new party they formed. So the new government had to be overthrown, a task that was accomplished last year by the yellow-shirted supporters of the People's Alliance for Democracy.
In many ways, the PAD is typical of conservative parties seeking to rein in the demands of the poor. It is backed by the army, senior officials and the upper-middle class, but its street fighters are mostly from the aspiring lower-middle class. But, this being Thailand, there is one big difference: the PAD actually wants to take democracy back from the poor.
Very bad outcomes to this impasse are possible, including a return to permanent military rule. More likely is that Thais will find a way out of their current blind alley, back to democratic normality.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries
