Orange may need soul-searching
To get a good idea of the current Thai political situation, think of the latest iPhone ad, where they slide an iPhone face-down down a long meeting table to prove its screen has amazing endurance.
Only imagine there are two phones. One is named the People’s Party and the other the Election Commission.
When the phones are picked up at the other end of the long table, the one with no or fewer scratches wins.
What we are witnessing is a credibility race between the two institutions. What eventually happens to one will affect the other immensely. The big difference from the actual iPhone advertisement is that the screens of both imaginary phones have been considerably damaged already.
Charges of poll irregularities are bruising the EC, just as suspicion surrounding the “Spectre C” and the laser ID requirement is threatening to overwhelm the People’s Party. This entire situation, of course, stemmed from the general election outcome which gave a landslide victory to the Bhumjaithai Party and humiliated the Orange camp in the process.
All the controversies are related. The conservatives’ relentless dig into the Spectre C company and the laser ID requirement in the People’s Party’s online membership application form would not have happened without the Orange’s campaign to discredit the February 8 election.
The EC’s integrity has never been challenged so tumultuously, but so has the People’s Party’s.
Who is going to win the credibility race? It will be decided both legally and politically. Their matters are reaching the hands of judges, who will have to figure out answers to some very-subtle questions.
Can the barcode and QR code on the election ballot be abused? If the answer is “Yes”, how high or how low is the possibility? The same goes for the laser ID requirement. Can it be abused? If so, how high or how low is the possibility?
As for Spectre C, who actually owns it? Is it a part or a branch of the People’s Party and thus making profits disallowed by law, a serious offence? Is it a private company that has no business getting its hands on ordinary citizens’ laser ID? Can it be classified as a “media” arm of the People’s Party, in which case it is, again, a serious legal offence?
Bad news for the People’s Party is that laser ID and Spectre C are threatening to get intertwined. But, separated or combined, they represent scary legal risks.
The People’s Party is obviously going for broke. Successfully discrediting the EC will not just cushion the election humiliation, but also will make the Spectre C and laser ID look like a diversion tactic of the conservatives.
And if the People’s Party survives the Spectre C and laser ID storms and comes out on top in the war with the EC, the complexion of the sexual harassment fight between its own members will change completely. As of now, it’s “washing dirty linen” coming out of a party promoting gender equality. That could turn into “See how free we are? We can criticise one another.”
But the initial idea that the People’s Party had next to nothing to lose post-election is changing. The endurance warfare is hurting its image much more than previously thought. From being perceived earlier as just a group of young ideological extremists, some outsiders have begun to watch the People’s Party with much stronger suspicion than before February 8.
It’s all because of the previously-ignored existence of Spectre C, and because of the laser ID controversy which is seeing arguments for being outweighed by arguments against. Whereas “What are soldiers for?”, Article 112 how its leader stood during the national anthem can be twistable political controversies, the new, emerging issues of Spectre C and laser ID are solid legal headaches.
And the new problems are materialising at a time when the People’s Party’s image is vastly different from the one in the immediate aftermath of the Pheu Thai “betrayal” in 2023, when the Orange popularity really peaked.
After that election in 2023, it was Pheu Thai which needed a soul-searching. It still does at the moment, but what has changed is that the People’s Party will now have to do the same.
The People’s Party will have to take this into consideration: While the EC image has suffered, Bhumjaithai’s is relatively intact, helped more or less by anti-Orange suspicions that never existed before and a changing border situation that will never be same ever again.
Such suspicions, for the moment at least, are louder than claims that Bhumjaithai won because “the referee helped it.” The People’s Party is a badly-bruised boxer complaining against a still-fresh opponent after a match.
When combined with the apparently-poor methods to select election candidates, Spectre C and laser ID are a huge political problem in addition to being a big legal trouble.
Planting doubts about the EC is a way to soften the blow, but when the two phones are picked up at the other end of the long table, both screens will have been heavily scratched. Should the People’s Party put all eggs in the EC basket?
Another factor that should be taken into account is whether the anti-EC sentiment has caught fire. And if a fire is definitely burning, is it as ferocious as the “anti-uncles” campaign in 2023, or is it still too far away from being an inferno? Were election “irregularities” the true cause of the devastating election outcome, or are they just something amplified unrealistically in an echo chamber?
Only after such questions have been seriously and truthfully pondered can a genuine soul-searching begin.