Nothing black-and-white about the Thai election -- or Southeast Asian politics

Mainstream news out of Southeast Asia at the moment is dominated by the election of Yingluck Shinawatra in Thailand.

The cautious tone of the commentary makes a welcome change in a region where political events are all too often portrayed as black or white.

Commentators see the vote as a rejection of the 2006 coup that ousted Thaksin Shinawatra, and of the various machinations that have since removed his supporters from government. But they rightly fear that this is not the end of the story. There will be many who will find this result hard to accept, and if Thaksin returns, the visceral hatred he inspires in certain quarters could trigger renewed conflict. The jury is still out on whether Yingluck will ultimately be good for democracy in Thailand or not.

Cautiousness is definitely in order, since Thailand’s recent political turmoil clearly warns of the dangers of rushing to conclusions about who to cheer and who to boo.

Liberals both in Thailand and abroad understandably criticized Thaksin’s drift to prime-ministerial authoritarianism in the early 2000s. But because he was so very easy to oversimplify and demonize, the yellow-shirted People’s Alliance for Democracy, which rallied to oust him, initially gained unreasonable levels of liberal support. No few experts at the time hailed their appearance as a laudable manifestation of civil society intervention in the monitoring of governance.

This approbatory mindset surely set the scene for the 2006 coup, and photos of Thais placing flowers on the gun barrels of tanks hit news outlets around the world. “This is a good coup,” my Thai students assured me.

Such sympathy paved the way for a decidedly muted inter-state reaction, sharply contrasting with the reaction to the coup in Fiji the same year.

But then the Yellow Shirts revealed distinctly undemocratic tendencies, flirting with elitist ideas about appointed parliamentary representatives, and backing a breed of popular protest that world opinion began to find questionable.

The lines were beginning to blur about who were the goodies and who the baddies in Thai politics. But by then, the damage had been done.

Politics, Thai or otherwise, rarely divides neatly into black and white. When the Thai election is again off the front pages, this is a message that should continue to resonate in our broader analyses of the Southeast Asia region.