Election further clouds Thai leader's future

Thai voters woke Monday to a political quagmire after an opposition boycott of Sunday's snap elections dented Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's hopes of quickly forming a new government. The result has produced a dangerous vacuum after months of mounting protests against Mr. Thaksin's rule.

How Thailand handles this impasse could determine the endurance of its political system, which has been slow to consolidate the democratic gains of recent decades. Observers warn that tough posturing by both sides may encourage more of the violence that flared during the campaign.

Thaksin's opponents have already dismissed the election as flawed and vowed to continue their street action until he quits. Legal challenges are also pending over alleged electoral fraud by Thaksin's party.

"The longer he stays on, the more the [protests] will grow ... how can you have an election without an opposition? It doesn't mean anything," says Kasit Piromya, former Thai ambassador to Washington who has joined calls for Thaksin's resignation.

Thaksin faces two hurdles with this vote. First, he had promised before the polls to step down if his Thai Rak Thai party garnered less than half of the votes cast. Monday, with official results still pending, Thaksin claimed to have surpassed the threshold.

Even if Thai Rak Thai ultimately misses the 50 percent mark, the party will have technically won and Thaksin is not bound by his vow to step aside. The opposition boycott meant that the ruling party ran unopposed in two-thirds of the seats, prompting many voters to cast a "No Vote" or to spoil their ballots.

The more pressing challenge to be resolved is 38 districts that failed to elect MPs because a single contender polled less than 20 percent of the eligible vote. This ties Thaksin's hands, since Thailand's parliament cannot convene without a full quota of 500 MPs, and reruns of empty seats may prove inconclusive.

Reforms in the 1990s were supposed to make this type of instability a thing of the past in Thailand. Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai party exemplified the type of national party envisioned by framers of the 1997 Constitution who sought a stable two- or three-party system, instead of messy coalitions.

Thaksin, a former police colonel turned tycoon, founded the party in 1998, using his Shin Corp. business offices as party headquarters.

He went on to take the party from success to success. After his victory in 2001 under a new constitution, Thaksin led a coalition government that became the first in Thailand to complete a parliamentary term. A landslide victory in February 2005 confirmed Thaksin's popularity and gave Thailand another first: an elected single-party government.

But the combination of electoral prowess and private wealth also undercut Thailand's old political elite and set off complaints of overreaching executive power. The $1.9 billion sale of Shin Corp. to foreign investors in January ignited the current political row.

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