The worst form of government, except for all the others
There was much to fault in the way Mr Thaksin ran his country, both before and after he fled abroad to avoid a jail sentence for abuse of power. With support from a poor, rural heartland in the north and north-east, neither he nor his sister paid enough heed to the interests of Bangkok’s middle classes or the southern provinces. In office Mr Thaksin favoured his own considerable business interests and weakened public institutions. He was a Berlusconi with less of the bunga-bunga. Appallingly, in 2003-04 he ordered an extrajudicial assassination programme that killed thousands of supposed drug dealers. His sister was less authoritarian but also less competent.
And yet the Thaksinite governments were probably no more corrupt than their predecessors were. Crucially, the Shinawatras did much to transform the lives of some of the country’s worse off. They built country roads, boosted education and provided health care for the poor. The old elites resented this, not least because they liked to think of the king traditionally atop an ordered hierarchy with deferential peasants at the bottom grateful for royal charity. Without putting it in so many words, Mr Thaksin implicitly challenged that dispensation, and a majority of Thais approved. But soon after he or his loyalists were back in office, the political stand-offs and the street violence would resume.