In many ways it's hard to like the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD). Its leaders spew vitriolic nationalist and often xenophobic rhetoric. Its followers wear uniform-like outfits that echo European fascism and the Village Scout movement involved in the brutal repression of student demonstrations at Thamassat University in 1976. Its defenders are armed thugs ready to club any and all opposition into bloody submission.
Viewed from the outside, as a monolith, the PAD looks like a frightening fusion of the kinds of bitterness and passions that inevitably lead to violence. After all, as PAD leader Sondhi Limthongkul has often declared, this is their 'final war'.
Yet the PAD is no monolith. It is a motley alliance of very unlikely bed fellows: Sondhi Limthongkul, the media tycooon with a grudge against Thaksin, Somsak Kosaisuk the state enterprise union leader, Chamlong Srimuang, the former Bangkok mayor, politician and activist who styles himself as a kind of latter-day Thai Ghandi. Left wing Peua Chiwit (For Life) rock stars, respected academics, police and military generals, students...all have climbed onto the PAD stage at Government House and raged against the government, often using violent and abusive language of the kind rarely heard here.
What holds them together? Why is that Thai friends I would normally portray as being on the left of the political spectrum, are fervent supporters of a movement that would more easily be defined, at least in traditional Western terms, as being on the far right?
Part of the answer, I believe, lies in their profound disappointment with Thaksin and, by extension, the political system as a whole. For many, Thaksin was given a mandate to usher in an era of reform. 'Kit Mai Thai Mai" (New Thinking and New Ways of Doing Things) was his slogan and many Thais believed it.
When Thaksin proved to be as corrupt, if not more so, than the 'dinosaur' politicians he had supposedly replaced, his erstwhile supporters felt betrayed and angry. The PAD, led most publicly by a man (Sondhi Limthongkul) whose hatred of Thaksin was well known, provided an immediate and obvious forum for the expression of these frustrations. Thais of all political persuasions could agree easily on one thing: Thaksin had let them down and somehow they needed to find a way of reducing corruption among the ruling class.
Thus the PAD gained its initial momentum by tapping into a vein of sentiment that is almost universal among Thais: politicians are corrupt, the police is corrupt, the country needs change.
But like a ball of string rolling forwards, gathering different coloured threads as it goes, the PAD has moved a very long way from its initial objective of removing Thaksin from power and picked up a number of different coloured political 'threads' along the way.
It has moved from being an apparent spontaneous political expression of frustration to a movement that looks more and more as though it is being orchestrated by powerful, yet invisible, forces who wish to facilitate wide sweeping political change. One woman told me the other day, the frustration audible in her voice, that "the PAD are untouchable. They can do whatever they want." And indeed, since their seizure and continued occupation of Government House, the PAD has appeared to be all but immune to the law.
Many PAD supporters remain with the movement out of a sense of loyalty and a feeling of belonging. The paraphernalia associated with the PAD, such as the hand clappers, the yellow scarves and bandanas, are enablers of this sense of belonging. They re-inforce the collective identity.
Many of these 'legacy' PAD supporters are not concerned with the details of the political agenda being proposed by the movement's leaders. Fundamentally, they are motivated by a desire to bring change to Thailand's political system and by a deep seated frustration at the dislocation between the nation's ostensibly modern economy and its politicians who are often caricatures of 'Third World' corruption. Many are Sino-Thai Bangkokians from the ranks of the middle class and, interestingly, many (sometimes it looks like a majority) are women. When the PAD leaders characterise the police or other figures of authority as 'animals' the crowd roar with what, to me, looks like a cathartic laughter as if such words were the expression of their own anger at the establishment.
There is another thread of PAD supporters who, in a society where conformity and respect for authority are the norm, position themselves as 'activists'. This thread is composed of those who are always going to be in opposition to established power. These are the Peua Chiwit singers, the unionists and the students who are intuitively comfortable rallying around an opposition battle cry. Strangely, this activist group overlooks the fact that the PAD's leadership is proposing a system, dubbed 'New Politics', that would see the traditional establishment reinforced through a democratic process whereby only 30% of the government would be directly elected and the remaining 70% would be appointed representatives from various sectors of society.
Indeed, it is one of the strangest paradoxes of the PAD movement that for all its anti-establishment, 'Che Guevara' type, bravado it actually seems to be proposing a reinforcement of the traditional establishment. I say this partly because I have not yet heard measures proposed by the PAD aimed at fighting corruption. Rather the PAD appears to be focused on changing the electoral system which would usher in a new set of leaders without proposing concrete steps to tackle the deeply engrained relationship between political power and corruption - whoever's hand the power may be in.
In a country where corruption has become the norm among politicians, the PAD has attracted a multi-faceted support base in Bangkok and other urban centers simply by being an advocate of change - without looking too closely to see if such change would actually be for the better.
For those in the countryside, where support for the PAD is almost non-existent, the perspective is entirely different. Rural voters are also aware that the political class is corrupt. More pragmatic than the city folk, however, the rural constituency often seems to characterise such corruption as 'normal'; behaviour that they have come to expect of the Phu Yai (Big People) in power.
With corruption being a given what remains are the results. What did Thaksin do for me? asks the rural voter. Though in reality Thaksin did little to change the lives of Thailand's rural majority, he did make a lot of promises to them and formulated policies aimed at improving their lives as virtually no politician before him had ever done.
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