Destined Statecraft by Pak Nung Wong

Author:Pak Nung Wong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

It could investigate the conducts and qualifications of any public officials and impeach any public office-holders, whether they are elected or appointed.

It could rule on the legality and legitimacy of any electoral process and outcomes.

It could review, investigate and determine the constitutional legitimacy of any political party to the extent that one may be ordered to be dissolved.

To hear and rule on the disputes of any state organs.

Equally important, the 1997 Constitution also stipulated that before taking office, every judge was expected to take an oath before the king to declare her/his loyalty and allegiance to the king as the head of the state (Merieau, 2016: 451).

Through this new constitutional arrangement, on the one hand, King Bhumibol authorized the Constitutional Court the exceptional powers to investigate, review, impeach, sanction and rule over any elected officials, political party and governmental agencies (Harding, 2007). On the other hand, because all the judges and justices had to declare allegiance and loyalty to the king, this granted the king the constitutional status as the ‘sovereign’ (Schmitt, 2005[1922]), who could operate above/out of the legal realm. As a result, in 1997, after fifty years of his persistent efforts to uplift the kingship over the military, King Bhumibol did not only succeed to transform himself from a weak king to the de facto military commander-in-chief, but he also succeeded to constitutionalize himself as the sovereign king and the head of the state, in which he was both in and above the legal realm of the Thai constitution. In sum, King Bhumibol had effectively commanded the two powers of the judiciary and the military.

In response to the challenge of populism since the late 1990s when Thaksin Shinawatra was firstly elected as the Prime Minister in 2001, after several monarch-endorsed coups staged from 2006 to 2014,12 a new constitution was approved by the Thai majority in the August 2016 referendum.13 The 2016 new constitution stipulated that all seats in the Senate will be sat by the military officers and appointed legislators. This legal framework will have significant constraining and determining impacts over the future elected prime minister, the elected parliamentarians and the government officials. Moreover, the new electoral regulations will only likely enable the future elected prime ministers to establish weak-coalition governments, which will be chaperoned by a special commission appointed by the junta. This was intended to prevent any possibility that the constitution would be amended by any future elected governments.14

To ensure the future stability of Thailand , King Bhumibol left the carefully crafted constitutional framework as his legacy since 1997 (Ginsburg, 2009). The 2016 Constitution provided the necessary legal foundation and juristic guidance for Thailand’s future democratization. This constitutional design is largely intended to guard against populist forces as a potent threat to the sakdina structured order (Crispin, 2016), which King Bhumibol had consistently defended in his seventy-year reign. In anticipation, future elections and elected governments in Thailand will continue to be chaperoned by a group of constitutional commissariats, mainly composed of the military officers and judges.

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