Social movements; democratization; monarchy; Thaksin Shinawatra; Thai Rak Thai Pary.
While the emergence of social movements is dated to the eighteenth century. With marked expansion during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Tilly 2004) Thailand’s social movements are largely a phenomenon of thelate twentieth centurv. Their emergence has generally been associated with
Deepening processes democratization. This marks the period since 2005 as seemingly incongruous as the leadership of many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social movements sought to destroy elected governents while supporting a military coup in 2006. Thailand’s recent political experience raises important questions bout the relationship betweensocial movements and democratization.
In this paper we examine the debates and political positions that sawmany social movements and especially their leaderships support ThaksinShinawatra who as prime minister from 2001 to 2006 was Thailand’ s most popular elected politician and his Thai Rak Thai (TRT) Party. Initial support dissolved, and within months of theTRT’s landslide victory in the2005 elections, these same leaders called on their followers to bring down the government In their campaign against TRT, there were call for Thailand’s octogenarian king to throw out the elected government and appoint a new administration. When this sthrategy failed, these activists threw their support behind the junta t hat ousted Thaksin in a palace-supported military coup on 19 September 2006 (see Hewison 2008; Connors 2008).
How was it that the leadership of social movements came to oppose a popular and trwice-eleted government? More importantly, how was it that they came to support the most conservative of Thailand’s political institutions – the monarchy and military-more usually associated with authoritarian politics?