RAWBangkok

Excerpts from a news anlaysis by Seth Mydans of the New York Times:

It looks a lot like a “people power” revolution, the kind of brave and joyous pro-democracy uprising that has toppled dictators from the Philippines to Serbia.

For more than two weeks, thousands of people have camped on the grounds of the prime minister’s office, cheering and clapping as speakers with microphones have stood on the back of a truck and called for the downfall of the government.

But in fact the protest is more like a counterrevolution by the Thai establishment against the rising electoral power of the mostly rural poor.

The government the protest seeks to bring down, whatever its faults, was democratically elected with a huge majority. The new order the protest proposes would roll back democracy by replacing an elected Parliament with one that is mostly appointed, keeping power in the hands of the country’s royalist, bureaucratic, military elite.

“This is a very weird situation where a reactionary movement is mobilizing people by using conservative ideology mixed with leftist language,” said Prajak Kongkeerati, a leading political scientist at Thammasat University.

In the vision of the protesters, power would run top-down, as it does in the hierarchy of traditional Thai society.

The confrontation reflects a dynamic that is visible throughout the region: an underclass that is growing in power and an entrenched establishment that is pushing back.

…

Whichever way the confrontation ends, analysts say, democracy is unlikely to be the winner.

…at its core, the People’s Alliance [for Democracy] would move Thailand away from the basic democratic principle of one person one vote, Mr. Prajak said. “Many Thai elite don’t believe in that,” he said.

The People’s Alliance would return the country to a 20-year-old model of “semi-democracy,” in which the bureaucracy and the military have a role in politics and business professionals share a voice with elected representatives, Mr. Prajak said.

In their resistance to democracy, the protesters are squarely in a political camp that has roots deep in Thai history, said Thongchai Winichakul, a professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The P.A.D. is a variation of the deep-rooted hierarchical society,” he said. “In a nutshell, it’s a kind of distrust of the people.”

He added: “You can find this idea beginning in the late 19th century, when King Chulalongkorn said Thai people do not want democracy, that Thai people trust the king.