The slogan of the new military junta that took power last spring from Thaksin’s sister is “Returning Happiness to the People,” which, it says, it will achieve in part by promoting reconciliation between the two contending sides. General Prayuth, the commander in chief of the Royal Thai Army at the time of the coup, and a career officer with a plainspoken and confident manner, might try to appease the Red Shirts by continuing some of the populist programs of rural investment that were invented by Thaksin and by suppressing any flare-ups of protest.
But the Thai political divide may be too wide and bitter, with too much accumulated enmity and too many incompatible interests at stake, for it to go away because an army commander orders it to do so. The junta may present itself as politically neutral and striving for reconciliation between what are called “the colors,” but its seizure of power is nonetheless and with good reason perceived to be a victory for the Yellow Shirts. If it tries to crush the power of the Red Shirts, then the calm that has prevailed in Thailand since the coup is very likely to give way to another round of furious confrontation. “The coup may have reduced chaos and violence…in the short term,” a study by a leading Washington think tank said a few weeks after the military takeover, “but it will not solve this crisis, nor Thailand’s core problems.”2
Thaksin is the scion of a wealthy Sino-Thai family from near the ancient capital of Chiang Mai in the Thai north. He made his fortune in the 1990s from a government-granted telecommunications monopoly. In 1998 he created a new party, called Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais), that permanently transformed Thai politics.