Not even 50-50 | 3.04.06
Looking at the party-list tallies from last year’s election, you might be led to think that Thaksin’s self-imposition of the 50-percent hurdle is but a rhetorical gimmick. His TRT Party is bound to win more than 50 percent of the votes anyway.
| Party | Votes | MPs |
|---|---|---|
| Thai Rak Thai | 18,993,073 | 67 |
| Democrat | 7,210,742 | 26 |
| Chart Thai | 2,061,559 | 7 |
| Total | 28,265,374 | 100 |
Since party-list seats are distributed according to each party’s share of the votes, the TRT party won 67 percent of votes cast in 2005, right?
Well, that percentage may be lower than some would’ve thought, misled by all the talk of “one-party rule” or what a saner newspaper would’ve called a single-party government. After a rough year in which former allies joined hands with his opponents in bombarding his government with the wickedest and wackiest allegations (precisely the kind that “educated, middle-class” voters lap up), a decline of 17 percentage points to below 50 is certainly imaginable.
Yet the TRT’s share in the last election is in fact significantly lower than 67 percent. The 28-million figure above is not the number of total votes, only the ones that count in the party-list race after blocks that amount to less than 5 percent have been scraped. See this article for the 5-percent cutoff at work.
The actual number of voters in 2005 is closer to 32,289,460, as calculated from the 72-percent turnout among 44,846,472 people eligible to vote. Therefore, the TRT won only about 59 percent of the party-list votes cast.
It was still a historic victory, of course. For some perspective, the TRT’s percentage in 2005 edged out Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 even though Reagan was competing with only one real opponent. Alas, history is not likely to repeat itself this time.
If roughly the same number of voters turn out this time, then the TRT has only to shed 9 percentage points, or 15 percent of its 2005 voters, to “lose” the election. Thaksin’s gentlemanly offer has made this a true referendum on himself, with the three opposition parties, Sanoh Thienthong’s faction of former TRT members, Sondhi Limthongkul’s cultists, the entire print media, anti-privatization unionists, anti-decentralization teachers, anti-Beer-Chang-IPO Buddhist fundamentalists, the People Sector™, and the so-called academia firmly united in the ad hoc “vote no one” party. Not to be too defeatist, but he has all along been fighting an uphill battle, one that he consciously brought on to himself.
Of course, the media won’t portray his campaign that way, however the results turn out.
PS Channel 11, the most state-owned of all state-owned channels, was showing election results to a tune from Sunset Boulevard. Jerks.
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