Thailand’s looming election is being haunted by its recent past that just won't go away. Deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s once-invincible Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party, which was dissolved earlier this year by a military-appointed Constitutional Tribunal for election fraud, casts a long shadow from its grave over the election outcome.

Surveys and general sentiments indicate that former TRT representatives and their nominees will triumph at the polls on the 23rd of December, on the back of the party’s proven populist platform under its newly reincarnated People Power Party (PPP). While Thaksin is politically wounded by a plethora of corruption charges and arrest warrants, the TRT is indestructibly alive in the collective imagination of the majority of Thai voters.

The PPP’s prospective victory would usher in a new phase of Thailand’s ongoing struggle to reconcile its neo-feudal past with its grassroots-driven democratic future. Unless and until this reconciliation takes place, Thailand’s political crisis will not be resolved, indefinitely marred by polarisation and deep-seated confrontation, which is likely to be magnified by the election results.

To be sure, the TRT is ostensibly dead. Its disbandment essentially stemmed from the party’s monopoly of Thai politics, its election victory in 2001 and landslide re-election in 2005, its wildly captivating populism that provided debt relief, micro-credit schemes, universally affordable healthcare, and other measures that extended opportunity, hope and dreams to the downtrodden who had long been neglected. Most of the defunct party’s executive members were banned from political office for five years, with the name Thai Rak Thai prohibited from future use.

Yet the party has been reborn into three main columns. The PPP is the TRT’s most natural, direct and rightful offspring. It comprises hard-core TRT elements that are overtly loyal to Thaksin and opposed to the coup and its backers. Led by veteran right-wing politician Samak Sundaravej, the PPP intends to dissolve all agencies set up by the coup-makers and to allow Thaksin to return to clear the charges against him. In the last stretch before the polls, the PPP has momentum in its favour, with the remote possibility of wining an unexpected outright majority. Its anti-coup and anti-military posture renders a PPP-led government unpalatable to the ruling generals and their allies who cannot afford Thaksin’s return for fear of political retribution.

While its unstoppable strength is the TRT’s policy platform, the PPP’s chief drawback is that it has Thaksin’s tainted name written all over it. The flipside of the TRT’s phenomenal and unprecedented success was Thaksin’s conflicts of interest and alleged graft. Thaksin's  opponents and critics despised him over the corruption charges and abuse of power as much as his rural supporters, who were accustomed to unscrupulous governments - but they were willing to put up with them as long as he and his party delivered their populist pledges.

Samak is also a liability to the PPP. A newcomer to the TRT cause, Samak has run an antagonistic campaign, and lacks populist credentials at home and credibility abroad. His candidacy to lead post-election Thailand is unappealing to many. Whether he or an alternative PPP candidate seeks the premiership will depend on the party’s likely margin of victory in the face of official harassment and intimidation. If it emerges as the largest winning party by a wide margin over the Democrat Party in the 480-member lower house, the PPP will have an indisputable claim to spearhead the next the coalition government.

As a coalition arrangement appears in the offing due to new rules that are biased against large parties, the PPP’s electoral fortune will hinge on a clutch of mid-sized parties. Chief among them is Puea Pandin. It stands for the TRT’s policy platform, with a royal association but without the Thaksin connection. Founded by a nephew-in-law, and represented on its party-list in the Bangkok voting zone by a cousin, of the queen, Puea Pandin pitches itself as an Establishment-backed choice with TRT roots. The TRT’s third flank consists of Ruamjaithai Chartpattana and Matchima Thipataya parties, full of professional politicians from upcountry patronage networks who preceded Thaksin’s rule. Both espouse the TRT’s agenda without being aligned with Thaksin.

The Democrat Party and Chart Thai Party, the TRT’s former parliamentary opposition, have become conspicuously populist, imitating the TRT. Unable to broaden its appeal in the south to the north and populous northeast regions, the Democrats’ numbers have reached a plateau, except in Bangkok and a few countryside pockets. Led by 43-year-old Abhisit Vejjajiva, its strength of elected MPs will be larger than in the last valid election in February 2005, but not by much. Chart Thai Party is geared up to emerge as a mid-sized party, although its leader Banharn Silapa-archa might try to over-leverage his lower numbers for the premiership in alliance with the larger PPP.

The ironic upshot in this TRT-dominated election is the growing likelihood of a non-PPP coalition government. A PPP-led coalition would just be too much to bear for Thaksin’s Bangkok-based opponents in the military, caretaker government and civil society. All non-PPP parties will come under growing pressure to close ranks behind a coalition that confines the PPP to the opposition benches. The beneficiary of this emerging understanding in the highest corridors of power will be the Democrat Party, which is likely to lead the post-election coalition with Abhisit or his Democrat mentor and former Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai as prime minister.

However, the Democrats’ numbers will have to be sufficiently formidable, especially in Bangkok where 36 MP seats are being contested, to stake a legitimate claim on power and the premiership. Otherwise, if the PPP wins but is confined to the opposition, the election may be seen as bogus both at home and abroad, and the PPP may protest and stir up another round of political turmoil that would test the mettle of Thailand’s post-coup powers-that-be.