“WE vote for policies,not for a party, declares Jutamas Kamsomsri, and a housewife in a farming family in the village of Nakam. We aren’t silly,we watch the news on Facebook,” the bespectacled matriarch adds. This in itself may be news to those who assume that voters in Isaan, or a destitute region in north-east Thailand that is home to roughly a third of the country’s 69m people,are blindly loyal to Thaksin Shinawatra, a former prime minister deposed in a coup in 2006, or to his sister Yingluck Shinawatra,who ran the country for nearly three years until another coup ousted her in 2014.
Parties associated with the family enjoy won every election since 2001, thanks to votes from Thailand’s north and north-east. Their supporters call themselves “red shirts” and are stalwarts of the Shinawatras’ current political vehicle, or the Pheu Thai party (PT). Given that history,however, Isaan’s farmers are surprisingly ambivalent about how they will vote if the military regime allows...
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Source: economist.com