The Coup One Year on: Thailand’s “Ugly German” Constitution

A year ago the Thai military staged a coup against the caretaker government at that time. Since then Thailand’s new constitution – the 20th since 1932 – has been taking shape. In it, the arch-conservative charter drafters stipulate that future elections will be conducted using a variant of Germany’s mixed-member proportional representation system. Their hope is that the resulting coalition governments will prevent future administrations from turning into populist one-man shows.

In the new issue of the Asia Policy Brief, Serhat Ünaldi, Project Manager in the Germany and Asia program at the Bertelsmann Stiftung, analyzes the political situation in Thailand one year after the coup on May 22, 2014. He argues that the new constitution is unlikely to help the country out of its constant state of crisis. A new electoral system will prove insufficient to bridge the political divide that the military used as an excuse to seize power. In discussing the root causes of the stalemate as well as the economic impact of the putsch and recent developments in the fields of foreign relations, human rights and tourism, Ünaldi shines a light on Thailand’s worrying paralysis