Thaksin’s lurch to populism, combined with his extraordinary wealth, then made many in the middle class feel insecure. They looked to the old institutions, the military and the monarchy, to make up for their weakness in numbers. Many were mobilized to join the yellow shirt movement of sustained street protests. The conflict within the elite thus broadened into two antagonistic mass mobilizations.
These two movements have then sparked a fierce ideological debate over how Thailand’s democracy should develop. The Red shirt side wants to restore the electoral system to something like the 1997 constisution as a precondition for reducing the “double standards” ,which of course means the entrenched power of old oligarchy.