Thailand: Abhisit’s ‘Grace’? – OpEd

By Andrew Spooner

So there we have it. After a coup, a massacre, battlefield-scale injuries, supporting fascist hate mobs as they ran amok, snipers blowing the brains out of 16year old Thai boys, dead nurses, a mini-war with Cambodia and getting into bed with one of the nation’s most corrupt politicians, Thailand’s defeated and former Prime Minister, the British-born and Eton-educated, Abhisit Vejjajiva, after a devastating failure by his party in Sunday’s Thai general election, has been forced to resign as leader of the Democrat Party.

What is staggering is that despite Abhisit’s blood-soaked grip on power – something he achieved without any democratic mandate or legitimacy and involving members of political parties that didn’t even exist at the last election in order to secure the parliamentary vote that gave him the premiership – some commentators (mainly drawn from the same foreign-educated privileged social class as Abhisit himself) are talking of his “grace.”

If there is one thing Abhisit lacks it is grace of any kind.

This is a man who whined about bullying when old ladies confronted him with cardboard signs. This is a man who went to the site most associated with the events of the Bangkok Massacre, a bloodbath that his own government instigated, in order to tub-thump like a true demagogue, rubbing the faces of the families of the dead in their own sorrow. This is a man who kept power by climbing over the corpses of Thai citizens. This is a man who spent half the election campaign complaining about a lone woman who protested against him 3months ago.

But there’s more. Abhisit was utterly humiliated in this election. It was a crushing defeat. His then pronouncements of “allowing” the victorious Pheu Thai Party to form a government just reveal his patrician arrogance and inability to understand anything about either democracy or his own country. No wonder the Thai people kicked him out on his behind.

Grace? That was never Abhisit’s gift to give.