Red shirt supporters of exiled Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra believe they will win Sunday’s election, which will return their “saviour” and improve their lives. But they also fear they will be cheated out of office and warn of a new wave of protests across the country if that is the case, triggering memories of last year’s demonstrations in Bangkok which were put down by the military in a crackdown in which 91 people were killed.
Thaksin is a divisive figure in Thailand, scoring landslide election wins in 2001 and 2005 only to be ousted in a 2006 military coup. In the heart of red shirt territory in the northeast, in the rice paddies, village stores and towns, there is an overwhelming confidence that Thaksin’s Puea Thai party will easily win the majority of votes and, hopefully, the majority of seats.
But in Thailand that may not be enough to form government, fear the people in the villages around Udon Thani, who are fed up with Thailand’s six-year political crisis. “I believe we will win 85 percent of the votes in my village, but will we form government? That is a worry,” Don Chainapun, a district red shirt leader, said on Saturday.
“People are worried about the army and higher ups. There will be no problem if they do not cheat us from forming government,” said Chainapun as he toured election booths. But if the red shirts believe they have been cheated then, they say, there will be nationwide protests which will focus on Bangkok, like the deadly protests in and around Rajaprasong. “If they cheat there will be protests in Bangkok for sure. It will be the same as the Rajaprasong protest,” said Tan Chaithep, chief assistant of the Red Shirt village of Ban Nong Hoo Ling, who manned the barricades at Rajaprasong.
Asked if there would be violence, Chaithep said: “It will be peaceful.” But villager Anong Wickadet, a thick-set young man wearing a camouflage hat, beaded necklace and sunglasses, added: “They will do anything to get a fair deal for Puea Thai.” Support for Thaksin’s Puea Thai, led by his younger sister Yingluck Shinawatra, has grown in the closing stages of the campaign.
There are now 1,000 dedicated red shirt villages, said Chainapun, up from a few hundred in June when Reuters first reported the phenomenon. Military-backed Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has urged voters to avoid the “poison” of Thaksin, saying Yingluck and Puea Thai were proxies for the telecommunications tycoon, who lives in Dubai to evade a jail sentence for conflict-of-interest charges he says were politically motivated.
THAKSIN THE “SAVIOUR”: Red shirt villages are clearly marked at their entrance with a large poster of a smiling Thaksin and red flags fly from houses. Posters accuse the rich, the Bangkok elite and top military of breaking laws with impunity — grievances echoed across a region home to a third of Thailand’s 68 million people. In these villages Thaksin is seen as Thailand’s saviour, the man who will return to make Thailand strong again and help ordinary people, struggling with rising inflation and low wages.
“They really want him to come back. They believe he will make things better,” said school teacher Garn Setsaenmok. “They see him as a saviour, a messiah.
