House to pick the PM, CDC decides
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Simple majority of MPs, not direct election, to decide on country's head of govt
The Constitution Drafting Committee decided yesterday that the House of Representatives would be authorised to choose the country’s prime minister, but did not seem clear on whether the PM would be an elected member of the lower house.
The 36-member CDC reached a consensus that the House would vote by a simple majority to install the head of the government, according to deputy chairman Suchit Bunbongkarn.
No decision has been made on the qualifications of the prime minister, as there are two opposing ideas on whether non-elected persons could head the government in case there is a need to break a political impasse, he said.
The CDC will meet again today to consider such issues as the number of MPs, he said. The committee will also consider the relationship between the legislative and executive branches as well as checks and balances, Suchit added.
However, the CDC’s decision yesterday went against the recommendations from the National Reform Council (NRC) and the National Legislative Assembly (NLA).
Suchit said the CDC owed an apology to the NRC and other bodies for not including their proposals in the constitution.
“Though the parliamentary system that we have used for 82 years – since the 1932 revolution – might have some problems, we can adjust and correct them,” he said. “But we have no guarantee that the new system would not cause any problems.
“We believe the old system has fewer risks than the [proposed] new one,” he said.
However, the CDC did take many proposals from the NRC and the NLA into consideration and will put them into the constitution, he said.
Opinions divided
The CDC met yesterday to discuss the hot issue of setting up an executive branch. During the meeting, the chairman of NRC’s panel on political reform, Sombat Thamrongthanyawong, said directly electing the prime minister would result in a better kind of democracy.
Sombat reasoned that his proposal would also help the prime minister gain more support from MPs, including on tackling the issue of buying votes.
However, some CDC members, many NRC members and also leaders of political parties opposed Sombat’s proposal.
“Even though the previous election system had many problems, we can find ways to solve those problems rather than creating a new system,” said CDC spokesman General Lertrat Ratanavanich. He suggested that a completely new system could create more problems than it solved.
He said the 36-member CDC spent more than a month studying the positive and negative sides of all proposals before making its decision.
Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Wissanu Krea-ngam told Patrick Murphy, the charge d’affaires ad interim at the US Embassy, in a meeting yesterday that Thailand would hold a general election by February 2016.
Asked whether the new constitution needed a referendum before taking effect, Wissanu said it would be the military’s ruling National Council for Peace and Order that made the decision on that matter. If the junta decided it wanted a referendum, it would have to amend the interim constitution to authorise it, he said.
