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Ceritalah | Why did Thailand’s junta bother with its farcical election?
- Prayuth Chan-ocha has turned these polls into an exercise in thwarting the Shinawatras
- Which begs the question: why carry out a vote if you’re not committed to the underlying principles?
Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
Chiang Mai is swathed in smog. It’s opaque, oppressive and disconcerting.
There’s no horizon. The air is yellowish and way, way above acceptable health levels: the result of forest fires and local slash-and-burn agriculture crashing head-to-head with El Niño, the global weather phenomenon.
But the sickly air quality – earlier in the year Bangkok was similarly shrouded in pollution – serves only to match the obfuscation and uncertainty surrounding Thailand’s first contested elections in over eight years.
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“We’re all frustrated but there’s nothing we can do about it,” Thitima Pitivarawong, a 38-year-old tutor from the northern city, says of the March 24 polls.
And it isn’t as if these elections were unexpected.
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Prayuth Chan-ocha, the general-turned-junta leader, has been discussing and planning the return to democracy and civilian rule from the moment he seized power back in 2014 after toppling the prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra – the younger sister of Thaksin Shinawatra, himself ousted 13 years ago.
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