Don Muang's a tough lesson for Pheu Thai

The Don Muang by-election became a clear model for study because Pheu Thai has dominated the constituency for years. With deeper consideration, it could be seen that Pheu Thai’s political support was based on supporters of former MP Karun Hosakul. Karun, a native Don Muang politician, became the all-time hero of the constituency for years before he was disqualified by the Supreme Court, leading to the by-election. His strong base helped the Chart Thai Party win its first Bangkok House seat when Karun supported Janista Liewchalermwong in the election. Karun later joined Thai Rak Thai, forerunner to Pheu Thai.
Although Don Muang is part of Bangkok, it is still like a provincial constituency because it has many communities with grassroots people living there. For these grassroots people, the party does not matter as much as the individual politician they support.
It was a blunder for Pheu Thai when the party thought its logo was more important than an individual candidate. So Pheu Thai treated the by-election with the same old attitude that “it could win even by fielding an electricity pole in the election”.
Actually, this was not the first time Pheu Thai has been taught this lesson. It had already suffered from this attitude when contesting the Bangkok governor’s election.
Tankhun became popular among Don Muang people because he continued to work for them even after he was beaten in the 2011 general election.
In addition, he proved it again with his efforts during the great Bangkok flooding late in 2011. He helped Don Muang people regardless of whether they were red-shirts or not.
But Karun was rarely seen helping Don Muang people during the flood crisis because he was busy at the government’s flood relief centre – trying to please the red shirts, rather than helping Don Muang people.
Worse still, Karun was seen as a hooligan and was engaged in a series of scandals. In the latest, a canvasser for Tankhun was shot dead and police could not trace the mastermind. This apparently prompted Don Muang people to have sympathy for Tankhun.
In the meantime, leading Pheu Thai members did not bother to find out whom Don Muang people preferred to represent them as an MP. So, the party made its own decision to choose Yuranant Phamornmontree as its candidate, thus tacitly telling its own members in Don Muang that none of them was qualified to contest the poll.
It was a top-down order that Yuranant, who is backed by Khunying Sudarat Keyuraphan, had to contest against Tankhun. Yuranant was ordered to resign as a party-list MP to contest the by-election, causing public confusion as to why an MP had to resign to contest to be an MP again.
Yuranant himself admitted he had only 18 days to campaign. It was as if he had entered the race out of the blue, hoping to ride along with Karun and the Pheu Thai’s popularity. The reason for choosing him as the candidate was purely political and had nothing to do with local people.
Eventually, these same local people taught a lesson to Pheu Thai: that politics was not a simple issue that could depend on the decisions of a few. They could not simply throw anything to the people for their support.
So, it is now about time for Pheu Thai and even the Democrats to seriously think about a primary voting system, which would allow voters to propose their choice of candidates for the party to endorse. This system would prove that the parties care about local people and would lay a strong base for democracy, allowing local people to vote for candidates really suitable for them.
Had the leaders of the party always been right, the outcome of the by-election would have been different. The Democrats should use this chance to implement the primary voting system more, and Pheu Thai should start implementing it now.