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IF he were a keen student of politics and contemporary events—and we all hope he is— President Aquino 3rd should look deeper into what just took place in Thailand, a founding member of the Asean, and learn from it. We don’t really need some fancy-worded paper from Kissinger and Associates to be guided on what took place there.

Two words sum it up: the Great Divide.

Thailand is essentially a country of two contending political factions. One faction is led by a billionaire living in exile, Thaksin Shinawatra. Thaksin, a popular former prime minister, is a wanted man in his own country. He would be locked up in jail should he return. He was, before his ascendancy to power and wealth, a pulis, a police officer.

The other faction is led by the former prime minister just voted out of power in an early July parliamentary election. Abhisit Vejjajiva is an Eton/Oxford-educated technocrat who speaks the language of the elite and would make international audiences listen to what he says about his country. With him are men and women of similar education, pedigree and bent, those out to remake Thailand. Those out to create an economic juggernaut, the first, within Indochina.

(Before his defeat, Abhisit was the second of the two prime ministers from Eton: he and David Cameron.)

Thaksin was dictatorial but his tyranny had a clinical, cynical political calculation. He muzzled the press, contrived to control the democratic institutions and reined in the judiciary. He decided that he should not be bound by the traditional deference to the revered monarchy. But there was another side to this – unabashed populism.

Through clever sloganeering and dole-outs to the poor, he positioned himself as a leader of the ordinary Thais, those outside of Bangkok, with focus on the northern areas that are impoverished and are resentful of the Bangkok-based elite. He advertised himself as the champion of the Thai underclass. The anti-elite.

Some sort of a clever Erap, minus the all-night feasting and drinking. While Erap confined his pro-poor bias to words and catch phrases, Thaksin did deliver goodies to the poor and the rural Thais.

Abhisit and his Democratic Party confederates are not much different from the technocrats and so-called economic reformers that thrived in the 80s and the early 90s. Those who lived by generating investments, opening up their countries to the broader world (and opening up every sector of their economy in the process) and zealously adhered to the mantras of deregulation and liberalization.

These leaders in general are more focused on attaining economic metrics, hard, cold and undisputed figures on growth, rather than feel the pulse on the ground and connect with the governed. They get frustrated when the state does not function with the efficiency and streamlined order of private corporations.

Much of Thailand has been divided into these two factions.

The elite, the middle class that reveres the monarchy, much of the media, the military leadership are aligned with the Abhisit group. They have an active, politically aware, organizationally smart group behind them, called the “Yellow Shirts.”

Thaksin has the masa, and parliamentarians from the northern and northeastern areas closely allied with him. His orders are carried out via his proxies, mostly members of his immediate family, who get involved in elections as representatives of the billionaire-fugitive.

Thaksin’s mass following is broader and more fiery, although it is handicapped by lack of organizational savvy. Thaksin has his “ Red Shirts.”

As the July 3 parliamentary elections had demonstrated, the language of technocracy resonated to a limited audience. The group of Abhisit proved its political clout in the urban areas where it got most of its parliamentary seats on the promise of making Thailand, not on the “ Detroit of Asia” or the most prodigious agricultural exporter of the region, but also a true economic tiger with econo-metrics to prove this.

Abhisit is also ever-popular within the circles of the wealthy, a section of a fawning press, the foreign chambers of commerce maybe, the military leadership and within the royal circles. And the parliamentary districts in southern areas of Thailand.

But the Thaksin group led by a sister, Yingluck Shinawatra of the Pheu Thia won the poorer areas via a landslide, a victory that does not need partnership with minor parties to effectively form a new government. It was an outright majority. It was the voice and the vote of the disenfranchised, the rural people, Thailand’s own promdi.

The vote was so clear that the military has found it impossible to find a gray area that it could invoke to step in and prevent Thaksin’s sister from leading Thailand as a proxy for his fugitive brother. And it prevented the judiciary from doing some legal maneuvers to stop the electoral tide that would vindicate Thais love Thais, Thaksin’s simply-formulated yet unvanquished slogan, which was also the name of his outlawed political party.

What is true in Thailand is also true here. PNoy should realize that even if the foreign chambers of commerce, the fawning press, the satisfied elite, the masters of the financial universe are all behind him, this does not matter when the poll takers go to the people and ask them what their sentiment toward the political leadership is.

The ordinary people, promdis like myself, always rate their leaders, their presidents, based on the state of their insecurity, misery and deprivations.

Asked to rate the president after a failed crop, and with government assistance zero or nil, what would the promdis say? Asked on how much trust do we have on the president after selling wares and kakanin in the big city and experiencing first-hand how the MMDA has been brutalizing commuters with pro-elite and anti-promdi rules, how would the promdis respond?

With a government absent from their lives, what do you think would be their response to questions about trusting the president? Or approving what he has been doing?

Right now, with the presidential pride sourced from good economic metrics and integrity in government, all those creditworthiness ratings from the rating agencies, but with nothing for the people below, PNoy is about to become an Abhisit. He would look perfectly OK on Bloomberg TV or CNBC because he can talk the jargon. But to the millions hoping to get a slot on Willie Revillame’s show, he would be a blur, a president who is clueless and heartless.

What a leader sows, he reaps.

If the presidential comfort zone does not go beyond the chambers of commerce and the approving elite, the promdis will seek out their own Thaksin, either through the ballot, or some other means.


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