Thursday Nov 14, 2024
Thursday Nov 14, 2024
Monday, 27 January 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
On Saturday, a government inister said Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra was prepared to discuss cancelling the 2 February election if activists ended more than two months of often unruly protests. The Government said it was ready to delay the vote if its opponents agreed not to boycott or disrupt a rescheduled poll.
Yingluck called the 2 February election in the hope of cementing her hold on power in the face of the disruption.
“Protesters blocked voters. In many areas of Bangkok protesters used force to prevent people from voting,” Foreign Minister Surapong Tovichakchaikul, also a Deputy Prime Minister, said in a televised address.
“This is a very serious offence indeed.”
Yingluck’s government had warned anyone who tried to stop voting would face jail or fines, or both.
Any delay in the poll will do little to quell the resolve of protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban, a former Deputy Prime Minister, who has rejected elections, and is unlikely to provide a quick resolution to the current deadlock.
It was already unclear whether the election would go ahead after a Constitutional Court added to the pressure on Yingluck on Friday with a ruling that opened the possibility of a delay.
The Government declared a 60-day state of emergency, in effect from last Wednesday, to try to curtail protests. While mainly peaceful, nine people have been killed and scores wounded in sporadic violence.
The protesters had vowed to shut down Bangkok - the world’s most visited city in 2013 - on 13 January and have since occupied key intersections, disrupting some aspects of daily life.
The protests are the latest eruption in a political conflict that has gripped Thailand for eight years and which is starting to hurt growth and investor confidence in Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy.
The conflict broadly pits Bangkok’s middle class and elite, and followers in the south, against mainly poor rural backers of Yingluck and her brother, ousted former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, in the populous north and northeast.
The protesters accuse Yingluck of being the puppet of her brother, who lives in self-imposed exile after a 2008 graft conviction he says was politically motivated.
They say Thaksin’s powerful political machine has subverted Thailand’s fragile democracy by effectively buying the support of rural voters with populist policies such as cheap healthcare and subsidies for rice farmers.
