Thai PM to meet kindred spirit on Myanmar trip

Myanmar and Thailand have a torrid history but the ex-generals who now head both governments will meet on Thursday with what is fast becoming a regional common purpose: stage-managing elections.

Gen Prayuth Chan-ocha's visit to Naypyidaw, Myanmar's capital, to talk to President Thein Sein in the shadow of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong will allow both men to compare notes on shaping tricky national votes slated for their countries late next year.

The Thai-Myanmar electoral parallel is part of a wider pattern in southeast Asia, as political establishments in several nominally democratic countries in this mostly autocratic region are pushing to massage their voting systems in what some critics see as gerrymandering.

"They want to use the facade of democratic processes to gain legitimacy," said Carl Thayer, a southeast Asia specialist at the University of New South Wales in Canberra. "But they are not willing to have a true liberal democracy where the result is beyond their control."

Gen Prayuth's symbolic journey across the Thai border to Myanmar is his first foreign trip since he was appointed prime minister by his ruling junta's puppet parliament in Bangkok in August. The mission's official agenda is to promote co-operation between the two countries at a bilateral and regional level, with the premier due to meet Thai investors in Yangon, the commercial capital.

But the real piquancy of the visit is in its timing, as the opposite recent political trajectories of these two once-warring neighbours approach a meeting point. While Myanmar has moved in the past few years from repressive dictatorship to a quasi-civilian administration and the promise of further opening, Thailand has seen what one blogger called "the empire strikes back": an elected government forced out by more than six months of pro-establishment civil disobedience culminating in Gen Prayuth's military coup in May.

Gen Prayuth and his Myanmar counterpart now face similar conundrums: how to organise elections they have said they will hold but risk losing because the interests they represent do not appear to have popular support. Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy has historically been a tough opponent for Myanmar's former junta, while Thailand's elite-backed pro-military Democrat party has not won a parliamentary poll for more than 20 years.

Political leaders in both countries have responded by taking or mooting actions that, under the justification of combating corruption or improving governance, will allow their power bases to retain significant influence outside the electoral process. Myanmar's military already holds a quarter of the seats in parliament, while the upper house has voted to discuss switching the voting system to proportional representation - perhaps fearing that the current first-past-the-post model system could lead to the kind of annihilation inflicted by the NLD on the dictatorship in an annulled election in 1990. In Thailand, a committee of junta placemen and women is devising proposals that many expect will include further diluting the influence of elected representatives, in favour of establishment-leaning appointees.

Other southeast Asian countries where elites are trying to marry unpredictable elections to guarantees of control include Cambodia, where Hun Sen, the leader of almost 30 years, has sidestepped allegations that he stole last year's parliamentary polls by promising reform to a national election commission much criticised for alleged bias. In Indonesia, parliament voted last month to end direct votes for governors for mayors, in what Joko Widodo, the president-elect who used such a system to rise to power from outside the traditional establishment, branded a "big step back" for democracy.

Jonathan London, a professor in the department of Asian and international studies at City University of Hong Kong, said the manipulation by old power networks contradicted theories that urbanisation, growing middle classes and better internet connectivity would create unstoppable pressure against authoritarianism in southeast Asia. "These assumptions underestimate the ability of entrenched elites to suspend, subvert or capture democratic processes, through a variety of established and more modern means," he said.

None of this is a done deal, as opposition forces push back in all of these countries. But for now one thing is for sure: when the leaders of Thailand and Myanmar shake hands, they will do so with more than the usual empathy felt in any meeting between two military men.

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