Protestors Want Thai Election Cancelled

Bangkok, Thailand - Feb. 3, 2014 ~ Protestors in Bangkok Rally to Annul Sunday's Election

Thai protesters have vowed to stage larger rallies in Bangkok and push on with their efforts to nullify the results of Sunday's elections, thus prolonging a national political crisis.

Despite fears of violence, voting proceeded peacefully in 90% of polling stations on Sunday. Protesters forced polling booths to close in Bangkok and southern Thailand, disenfranchising millions of registered voters. As a result, not all parliament seats will be filled and a series of byelections are required to complete voting, extending political paralysis for months.

Protesters said they would fight the election on several grounds, including that it is required by law to be held on one day. The opposition Democrat party, which backs the protesters and boycotted the vote, said on Monday it was studying other legal justifications to invalidate the vote.

The struggle to hold the polls was part of a three-month-old conflict that has split the country between supporters of the prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, and opponents who allege her government is too corrupt to rule.

Demonstrators have occupied major intersections in Bangkok and forced government ministries to shut down and work elsewhere.

"We are not giving up the fight. We still keep fighting," protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban said. "Our mission is to keep shutting down government offices, so don't ask us to give those back."

Suthep, a charismatic speaker and former opposition politician, said the movement was closing two of its Bangkok protest sites and asking crowds to consolidate at five other locations, mostly in the business centre of the capital.

The plan was bound to cause more disruption in central Bangkok, where protesters have shut major intersections in the Silom and Sukhumvit business districts and Ratchaprasong shopping district, where the city's upscale malls are located.

The protesters want to suspend democracy and are demanding the government be replaced by an unelected council that would rewrite political and electoral laws to combat deep-seated problems of corruption and money politics. Yingluck has refused to step down, arguing she was elected by a landslide majority and is open to reform but that such a council would be unconstitutional and undemocratic.

The protesters are a minority that cannot win through elections, but they comprise a formidable alliance of opposition leaders, royalists and powerful business people who have set their sights on ousting the government. They have won past battles – by ousting Yingluck's brother, the former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, in a 2006 army coup, and by forcing out two Thaksin-allied prime ministers through controversial legal rulings.

Many believe another "judicial coup" will bring down Yingluck's government.

Suthep's public assurance to followers that the ballot would be nullified left no doubt that the constitutional court would end up hearing a case to annul it, said Verapat Pariyawong, an independent lawyer.

If the ballot was nullified, Verapat said, there would be "more blood on the streets", a reference to the expectation that government supporters in the north were unlikely to sit idle.

Before Thaksin was deposed in 2006, the constitutional court nullified a vote won by his party a month earlier. The ruling partly found that the positioning of ballot booths had compromised voter privacy.

- Source - www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/03/