Duncan McCargo checks in on Bangkok, where General Prayuth Chan-ocha, the leader of the May coup, has installed himself as prime minister. McCargo writes that the new regime is already starting to wear on people:
The coup has been largely a Prayuth affair: Besides the song he wrote in early June, in which he exhorts his fellow citizens to “have faith” in the military, the general has his own Friday night television show, on which he lectures his fellow Thais on topics ranging from education to how to raise their kids. (The show, broadcast on every Thai TV station, is called “Returning Happiness to the People.”) His fellow senior officers, including Supreme Commander Thanasak Patimaprakorn, who is nominally Prayuth’s superior, find themselves at the beck and call of the army chief. His office even vets their schedules before they can confirm appointments, two people familiar with the matter told me.
According to a former Thaksin minister, “the boss,” as he called him, had told everyone to lie low and to wait for the military to begin alienating people. That may have already begun. Despite the soft lyrics of his song, Prayuth is not setting out to win friends. After an initial flurry of overt resistance in the first couple of weeks from anti-coup groups — mainly “red shirts” loyal to Thaksin, who now lives in self-imposed exile in Dubai — the opposition has largely gone underground, as a result of the junta’s harsh crackdown on dissent.
Predicting that Prayuth’s creeping authoritarianism will only get worse, Josh Kurlantzick considers how the US should respond to the prospect of an entrenched military regime in Thailand:
