[BRIEF NOTE] Democracy abroad

[rfmcdonald]

Thailand.

A bloodless coup in Thailand has upended the country's fragile democracy, to the delight of many middle-class activists who had campaigned for months for the removal of Thaksin Shinawatra, the populist prime minister. But the manner of his removal by Army officers loyal to the Thai monarch exposes the shallow roots of the democratic institutions that grew in the shadow of past military regimes.

Mr. Thaksin, whose party has won three elections since 2001, had repeatedly accused his opponents of plotting a coup. Wednesday, Thailand's king endorsed the military coup leaders, who have pledged to restore civilian rule within weeks.

The readiness of self-styled democrats to condone the military action reflects the conservative grounding of Thailand's urban political culture, which is shaped more by royalist hierarchy than well-defined checks and balances on a strong executive.

Hungary.

As they strolled through central Budapest yesterday morning, many Hungarians saw things that brought them back to the bad days of 1956: public squares littered with burned-out and overturned automobiles, bullet casings, shreds of clothing, piles of rubble and splotches of blood where thousands of rioters had battled with state police.

But this was not 1956, when Moscow's tanks rolled into the city and turned the Eastern European country into an effective colony of the Soviet empire for the next 35 years. This week's riots were just as surprising, and almost as violent, as the clashes 40 years before. This time, though, history was repeating itself as part tragedy, part farce.

Last night, 10,000 more demonstrators gathered in downtown Budapest in a second night of protests, the largest and most violent that have been seen in the largely peaceful country in half a century. Some of the protesters set up tents and brought large supplies of food.

This time, the anger was not a response to Moscow's lies, but to a surprising and rare moment of apparent political honesty.

On Sunday, Hungarian state radio broadcast an allegedly secret tape recording of Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany declaring that his government had been built on a public fraud: "We lied in the morning, we lied in the evening."

Mexico.

Standing among 150,000 people shouting ¡Viva Mexico! Geronimo Rodriguez Hernández, a 50-year-old brick maker, waved a large flag emblazoned with Mexico's national colors and the phrase Convención Nacional Democrática, or the National Democratic Convention. Even afternoon thunderstorms didn't deter Hernández from attending the Sept. 16 rally organized by the former presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Gathered in the Zócalo, Mexico City's historic town square, the crowd cheered and chanted for the city's former mayor who was defeated in the July 2 election by 234,000 votes. While many said they felt emboldened by the nearly two-month-long protest, which halted traffic in the surrounding blocks, others blamed the encampment for driving away business and tourism, resulting in lost wages, particularly for waiters, taxi drivers and hotel staff. Until early September, when Obrador lost a battle with the nation's highest electoral court over the results, his supporters had been camping out in the square for seven weeks.

[. . .]

Eventually a sea of raised hands voted to form a parallel government by swearing in Obrador as president on Nov. 20. He plans to rewrite the Constitution in order to guarantee the people health care, food and work. The crowd also renounced Calderón and his cabinet's authority and condoned future acts of civil resistance.

Hernández, the brick maker, said it was too early to tell if the continued protest and refusal to recognize Calderón might result in military or political upheaval. He planned to stay involved regardless of calls to end the conflict. "We believe in Obrador and in the new system of government that he wants to create," he said. "That is our dream."

Back at the Head Heeb's thread on the apparently successful coup in Thailand, Alexander commented that there seems to be "different rules for governments after a successful revolution (violent or not). The level of trust in "authority" is much lower than in a more stable system, and everyone is much more aware of how weak any government's grip on power is when the people decide that they won't put up with it." We might do good to look at the example of 19th century France to see where this sort of style of government might take in this class of liberal but revolution-prone countries.