Thailand Votes

In the first vote since the military deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, people are going to polls and are voting for Thaskin's party in droves. It looks like the party, a successor to Thaskin's Thai Rak Thai, will win the most votes, but will likely still need to form a coalition government with other smaller parties.

Since its transition from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one 75 years ago, Thailand has seen its government overthrown by coups 18 times.

While dozens of political parties are competing, the race comes down to two fundamental choices: candidates backed by the army and its interim government, and those who support Thaksin, a 58-year-old telecommunications tycoon who owns the English Premier League Manchester City Football Club.

Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) party won two landslide victories before he was accused of corruption and deposed in a bloodless coup last September.

Military rulers banned Thaksin's party and changed the constitution, in part to weaken the power of the prime minister.

The generals promised to return Thailand to a civilian government, and they are delivering on it with Sunday's elections. The problem for them, however, is that they may be returning the country to Thaksin loyalists.

The party that is leading in the polls is openly pro-Thaksin. And its leader takes no issue with the fact that many consider him simply a stand-in for the deposed prime minister.

"What's wrong with that?" Samak Sundaravej of the People Power Party said. "Even by law it's not against. But nominee is a good worker."

Should his party win, Samak has vowed to return to the old constitution and bring Thaksin back from exile in London.

Samak, like Thaksin, has tapped into the kingdom's rural poor, many of whom feel left out of Thailand's rapid development.

"The rural majority have been awakened," said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.

The military says that it will abide by the vote unless there are signs of fraud or corruption.

What goes unmentioned in many of the articles I've surveyed about the election is the role of the Islamist insurgency in South Thailand. The military has failed to crush the insurgency, and an appeasement strategy has failed utterly as the violence only escalated in the past year.