The crisp company Frito Lay has traditionally sourced its spuds from here, but subsistence farmers say its offered price has gone down every year since the military junta seized power in 2014.
Among the many economic victims of Thailand’s 12th coup was, apparently, the potato crisp.
Farmers were told people were no longer spending on snacks under the junta, but Chamras, 62, isn’t buying that.
He says big business has flourished under an unelected administration that showed scant regard for the poor until it decided to dress itself up as a political party and run for democratic office.
Five years of military rule has been particularly hard on Thailand’s north and northeastern farmers, heartland voters for former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and, with his overthrow and exile, his sister Yingluck.
Both won loyalty with populist policies such as farm subsidies, microfinance schemes and a subsidised universal healthcare system, but also were accused of corruption.
Like many Thai farmers, Chamras took advantage of the subsidies to invest in land and equipment only to find himself struggling after Yingluck’s Pheu Thai government was removed and she, too, went into exile. He is now saddled with crippling debt and a rice crop that fetches less than half what it did six years ago.
For millions of poor rural and urban Thais, tomorrow’s election is critical.
“On March 24 I am going to use the pen to eliminate General Prayuth (Chan-ocha) because if he continues in power we will only get poorer,” Chamras says, referring to the junta leader who is seeking a return to office as the prime ministerial candidate of the military’s Palang Pracharath Party. “When I was younger I didn’t see how elections were relevant to us. It was only under Thaksin and Yingluck I realised why it was important. This was a democracy that was tangible, you could touch it.”
If Prayuth is returned to power — the most likely result given the military-drafted 2017 constitution hands him an almost insurmountable headstart by mandating a junta-appointed Senate — farmers won’t stand for it and will return to the streets in protest, as they did at the overthrow of the Shinawatra governments, he says.
“I’m not getting any younger so I am trying to instil in my kids and grandkids the importance of standing up for democracy you can eat. Why don’t the military just give the power back to the people? Isn’t five years enough? Why do they write their own rules and set traps to hold power?”
When Prayuth led the latest army takeover in May 2014, after months of civil and political turmoil, he said it would be the “coup to end all coups”. What that meant has become clearer as elections neared and pro-democracy forces confronted a system designed to keep the military in power.
Prayuth learned the lessons of the 2006 coup in which a poll held 15 months later delivered another landslide victory to Thaksin, archrival of the military and Bangkok elite.
The new constitution not only stacks the 250-seat Senate with military appointees who jointly choose the prime minister with the elected 500-seat lower house but also obliges governments to follow the military’s national 20-year strategy.
Last month Thai Raksa Chart, the sister party of the pro-Thaksin Pheu Thai that is expected to win the most seats tomorrow, was dissolved by the Constitutional Court for nominating King Vajiralongkorn’s sister as its prime ministerial candidate. That has probably cruelled pro-Thaksin parties’ chances of a lower house majority. Two Pheu Thai candidates face sedition charges, while three members of the anti-junta Future Forward Party, including its 40-year-old leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, have been charged with computer crimes.
A new voting system makes it harder for one party to win an outright majority, as only pro-Thaksin parties have done in the past four elections, by preserving 150 lower house seats for party-list candidates.
Chaturon Chaisang, chief strategist of the now-dissolved Thai Raksa Chart, says that by trying to suppress pro-democracy parties, Prayuth has turned the election into a referendum on whether he should remain in power. With up to half of Thailand’s 51 million voters claiming still to be undecided, Chaturon says people are thinking “very carefully about whether they want General Prayuth as PM”.
“He already has the upper hand with 250 senators but there aren’t many political parties behind him with the potential to gain a lot of lower house seats,” he says.
Even if Palang Pracharath and allied parties do secure the 126 lower house seats (on top of the 250 Senate seats) needed to return Prayuth to office, it does not guarantee he can govern, as without a majority in the lower house he will not be able to pass legislation.
Thitinan Pongsudhirak, of Chulalongkorn University’s Institute of Security and International Studies, says all roads lead to a constitutional crisis.
“In the longer term, in my view, the (parliamentary) deadlock will spiral into a political crisis deriving from the 2017 constitution, which is the source of all kinds of problems because it’s a stacked deck,” he says. “I don’t know how the deadlock will be resolved because the dynamics for a resolution are still evolving.”
Will it lead to the dissolution of parliament and new elections? Another coup? Maybe even the intervention of King Vajiralongkorn, whose coronation following the 2016 death of his father is just weeks away? “It depends on the role the new monarch would like to play, and the role he is allowed to play,” says Thitinan, though official results will not be known until after the May coronation.
Prayuth remains popular with the Bangkok elite, middle classes, royalists and bureaucrats for restoring stability to Thailand after decades of political turmoil and civil unrest. But he is widely resented for suppressing political activity and free speech and for failing to improve Thailand’s fortunes.
If Prayuth couldn’t turn things around in five years with an absolute hold on power and no opposition to contend with, how will he manage with even a nominal democratic system?
It’s a question Thailand’s best-known political satirist, Winyu John Wongsurawat, has posed at his peril on a new YouTube talk show, which ditches the slapstick humour that has lent him cover to criticise the junta via his wildly popular Shallow News In Depth.
“Whether Prayuth stays in power or doesn’t, I still feel like things are going to get worse because of the constitution they wrote, but at least now there will be an opposition,” he says.
Winyu has been told his new show — Find Trouble— is already on the radar of the junta, which has warned that those who slander the administration will face criminal charges. But he says the junta’s repressions have only stoked the frustrations of Thailand’s young voters already angry over corruption and a laggard economy.
Many of them are expected to vote for Future Forward and its telegenic candidate Thanathorn, one of 68 vying for top office, who has tapped into anti-military sentiment with promises to rewrite the constitution, slash the army’s budget and punish coup plotters.
“The younger generation are running wild on social media and it’s scary because they criticise the soldiers, the army, the judges and courts that dissolved Thai Raksa Chart,” Winyu says. “They make jokes about Prayuth and his new (soft focus) photo shoots.”
However much the junta has stacked the decks in its favour, Thais are champing at the bit to have their say.
Last Sunday, almost 90 per cent of those registered for early polling came out to vote and a similar turnout is expected this weekend.
At a Bangkok lunch market, bread seller Yupin says she is excited about voting. “We need to break from the old parties,” she says, which had collectively failed to improve the lot of most Thais now struggling with rising prices and falling wages.
“When Prayuth came in he made things calm but it’s time for democracy now. That’s what people are yearning for.”
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In a corner of Chamras Lunma’s tin-roofed farm shack in northern Thailand’s Chiang Mai province, sacks of recently harvested potatoes sit rotting for lack of a buyer.