The recent triumph at the polls of ousted former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s People Power Party (PPP) has brought Thailand back to square one, a full circle that has lasted more than two years, comprising three main phases. The first began with sporadic, limited anti-Thaksin protests in Bangkok in September 2005 and intensified throughout 2006 to the climactic military coup on 19 September. The second phase belonged to Thaksin’s opponents but they made a mess of it. They managed to see to it that his Thai Rak Thai party was dissolved and 111 of its leading members banned from politics but they were unable to put him away for good politically on the corruption and other charges that led to the putsch. The third phase now belongs to Thaksin.

At issue is how he intends to play his winning hand, to what extent he can command from exile his PPP-led administration, and how his opponents will forestall Thaksin’s efforts and cling on to the Thailand that they built and presided over for several decades. Unless the two sides are able and willing to converge, Thailand faces prolonged and protracted instability and volatility as it plunges farther into the uncharted waters of the 21st century.

To be sure, the generals who overthrew Thaksin and the powers-that-be who backed them are now cornered and snookered. On the one hand, international public opinion and domestic expectations now require democratic rule. It is an entrenching norm of the new era. They can seize power by force but the men in uniform are inevitably forced to come up with a constitution and elections in which Thaksin’s proxies and cohorts are poised win indefinitely owing to their populist agenda that captured the popular imagination and addressed long neglected needs and grievances of the majority of the electorate.

On the other hand, the generals are ill-equipped to manage Thailand in the era of globalisation with rising expectations at home and growing pressures from abroad. Indeed, the junta has proved unfit in their handling of post-coup Thailand. Policy directions have been murky, leadership incompetent, overall administration inept. The generals have made themselves obsolete by botching their latest putsch. Thailand has changed dramatically over the last generation while the Thai military has remained more or less the same. This means another coup is less appealing even to the generals, let alone the Thai public and the international community.

The failure of the junta is all the more pronounced in view of the PPP-led government of Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej that has re-adopted wholesale the populist policy agenda of Thaksin’s previous Thai Rak Thai administration. The raft of policies to be announced by the Samak government will feature rural debt suspension, village micro-credit and handout schemes, cheap universal healthcare, public investments in mega-infrastructure projects, the legalisation of underground lottery, CEO governor, CEO ambassadors, One-Tambon One-Product, cows for farmers and computers for schoolchildren, anti-drugs campaigns, and the like that were central to TRT’s rule.

These policies will be packaged as a massive economic stimulus to boost consumption and investment and restore investor and consumer confidence with the aim of giddy GDP growth at the expense of the sufficiency economy under the caretaker government of Gen Surayud Chulanont. The pro-poor, pro-grassroots policies will be so resurgent that they will look like overcompensation, making up for lost time because the majority of voters harbour pent-up expectations of policy performance due to the lack of results under Gen Surayud’s tenure. The pressure on the new government to deliver on its promises of bringing back the perceived good old days will be immense.

The constraint on populism this time around is that the movers and drivers of policy are inferior to the economic team that propelled policies under Thaksin’s helm. Almost all of the leading policymakers from the Thaksin era are paralysed by the TRT’s dissolution and consequent five-year ban from politics. In an effort to prevent conflicts of interest and cronyism, the new constitution and related laws also contain safeguards that have discouraged policy experts to enter cabinet, such as lengthy intervals between public service and private sector re-entry. As a result, Samak will have a second team at his disposal, while new faces shy away and Thaksin and other first-team members continue to look for ways to re-enter the fray.

Given fewer policymaking talents to work with, the new cabinet is led by Mingkwan Sangsuwan and Suraphong, with respective backgrounds in marketing and medicine, as economic team leaders in commerce and finance portfolios in addition to concurrent deputy prime ministers. They are an unproven duo who will have to move quickly to generate policy momentum and produce results without incurring fiscal profligacy and degenerating into a ball of conflicts of interest and graft.

Apart from having to settle for a second-rate cabinet, Samak will be hard pressed to supervise and coordinate policies across ministries due to the nature of coalition make-up. A few key portfolios, including deputy finance slots, have been distributed on a quota basis to spouses and nominees of patronage-driven provincial party bosses who have little policy experience. Controversies over competent performance and allegations of graft are likely to hound the Samak cabinet from the outset.

Moreover, Samak himself is an old-style politician steeped in manoeuvrings and negotiations, not policy expertise. The prime minister’s chief tasks will be to ensure the PPP’s survival in the face of fraud allegations and coalition government viability, to pave the way for Thaksin’s eventual return and to provide the rehabilitation of the banned former TRT executives. Samak is unlikely to supervise concrete policies on the ground. Without a support base of his own in PPP and without macro-policy expertise, his coalition leadership will be problematic. And Samak is haunted by his past involvement in the right-wing violence against student activists in the mid-1970s. The skeleton in his closet from his right-wing days will increasingly gnaw at his credibility as national leader.

Yet the new Samak-led government provides near-term clarity in Thai politics without settling and reconciling the polarisation and deeply rooted confrontation between Thaksin and his opponents. But it is a much needed step forward in Thailand’s political maturation. Despite its unsavoury composition, the Samak cabinet’s legitimacy is in its own hands. Its policy performance and relative integrity will hold the key to its political longevity and Thailand’s stability.