Needless to say its been a very interesting couple of weeks with Thai politics with yellow shirts, red shirts, taiwanese style parliamentary sessions with members slapping one another.

Today the government is structured as so…

Just as a quick review see below for a brief timeline of recent events…

The key points that the PT government wanted to push through in the bill are:

and…

Thaksin’s first route to try to come back to Thailand is via the reconciliation law or passing of the amnesty bill.

This ideally is his quickest route back here but the issues that have arising as as follows:

1. When parliament moved this to the top of the agenda, the PAD (yellow shirts) came back  to the streets
2. Co-operation between democrats and other parties to delay the bills’ liberation
3. PT in the end will most likely have to wait until parliaments next session in August.

His second route is via constitutional amendments which would allow him to come back to Thailand next year at the earliest

The key steps required here are:

1. The House needs to pass amendments to the current charter to set up the constitution drafting assembly (CDA)
2. If passed the CDA can be formed via election of 77 members and parliamentary appointment of 22 members
3. The CDA can then draft a new constitution to be endorsed by HM the King.

The only option we feel that the democrats have is to delay the process, they’ve succeeded in their first attempt of slowing him down when they disrupted parliamentary proceedings last week, their second attempt is to try and have the reconciliation bills tied to the Budget Bill which requires a quorum of 333. Presumably the reasoning is that if Thaksin were to get amnesty he could then lobby to have his Bt46 bn confiscated funds returned which would affect government finances. We highly doubt this will succeed!

Now about about these lovely yellow shirts??

In our eyes, their leadership has splintered and this group found its biggest success in fomenting hatred towards Thaksin, but now that he is out of the country there is no real target for its supporters to attack. Also the group’s attempt at have a representative party in government, its “New Politics Party”, ended in total failure as they won no seats in the Housee in the 2011 election

So what will happen next?

Street riots? Highly unlikely.

 

Military Coup? The military would have a lack of support at this junction.

Impact on the market? Minimal at best.

In the end just enjoy watching the drama unfold, its far better watching than the local thai drama shows!