Referendum has sting in tail for political conflict

The latest amendment to the interim charter requires the National Legislative Assembly to select a question that will be added to the form on which voters will say yes or no to the draft constitution.
The amendment also stipulates the NLA must listen to the opinion of the National Reform Steering Council (NRSC) before making a final decision.
Last Friday, the NRSC settled for the question, “Shall the prime minister be elected by Parliament?”
Simply put, this is tantamount to asking whether senators should be allowed to join MPs in electing the prime minister.
More importantly, the 250 senators will be appointed by the National Council for Peace and Order, in line with provisional clauses of the draft written by Meechai Ruchuphan and his Constitution Drafting Commission.
Should this proposal be endorsed by a majority of referendum voters, unelected senators would be handed the right to elect a prime minister and thus enjoy the same authority as MPs elected by the people. Worse still, if the senators are given the power to elect the PM, they will certainly also be handed the power to hold censure debates against the country’s leader.
The move is fuelling general concern that the NCPO is seeking to perpetuate its grip on power beyond fresh elections.
The NCPO may argue that the additional question was concocted independently by the NRSC without any prompting. However, NRSC members who campaigned and voted for the question’s inclusion are apparently close to the NCPO. They include Steering Council President Tinnapan Nakata and vice president Walairat Sri-aroon, who had abstained from other Council votes before both voting yes to the additional question.
It was also supported by senior NRSC member Thitiwat Kamlang-ek, who is seen as having close ties with the junta. Thitiwat is reported to have lobbied military and police members to reject the charter draft written by Borwornsak Uwanno’s now-defunct National Reform Council.
After it was selected by the NRSC, some NLA members came out in support of the additional question, revealing that several Assembly standing committees had proposed similar questions.
The NLA will today debate and finalise the question to be tagged onto the referendum.
All this prompts us to ask why Meechai and his charter writers didn’t incorporate the proposal to hand senators such power from the beginning.
There are three possible answers.
First, Meechai and the CDC believed that proposing such powers for an unelected Senate would lead to trouble, so they refused to comply with the junta’s wishes. As a result, the NCPO had to propose it as a referendum question.
In the second theory, both the junta and the CDC agreed that handing senators the power to select the PM would cause the draft charter to be shot down in the referendum. So they decided to present it as a separate question. That way, if the voters say no to the charter but yes to the controversial question, the NCPO could still claim legitimacy in retaining the clause on Senate power in the next charter draft.
In the third theory, certain NRSC members engineered the question to gain favour with the junta in the hope of being appointed to the Senate.
Whatever the truth behind the added question, the NCPO should realise that handing such powers to unelected senators will only widen the political rift. It would also add to perceptions both here and abroad that democracy in Thailand is at best half-baked and at worst a sham.