Will General Prayut keep his roadmap deadline?

“I believe he will need about two to three years to complete his mission,” Varin Buaviratlert said.
But then, a real insider, Deputy Premier MR Pridiyathorn Devakul, has taken the opposite tack. He has been quoted as saying that the current government can’t stay on longer than the one-year limit as stipulated in the roadmap laid down earlier by General Prayut in his capacity as head of the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO).
He says any attempt to stay on for longer than that will only provoke opposition and resistance. Pridiyathorn shot down fears that if an election were held on time, the red shirts would return again. That, he argues, would be up to the people to decide, and the powers-that-be would find it difficult to come up with an acceptable excuse to extend the deadline of the current roadmap.
Does anybody know whether Prayut intends to keep his promise to ensure that elections are held late next year and a popularly elected government is installed a few months after that?
If he is weighing his options, the premier has not told anybody about it. He has complained about the “tough job” he is facing. He has painted a depressing picture of the difficult mission of the National Reform Council “because some people are still trying to protect their own interests”. He has also said he doesn’t want to stay in power a day longer than is necessary.
But Prayut has also made it known that if the reform process fails to live up to expectations, the country would face the risk of returning to the chaos of the pre-coup days. He has repeatedly talked about a “Thai-style democracy” but he hasn’t elaborated on how he defines that term.
Officially, he has no control over how the reform debate will proceed – or whether the diversity of views will end up with any clear-cut conclusions that could lead to a peaceful and constructive transition. Unofficially, though, the premier certainly hopes to be able to influence the process.
But even if he can call the shots on how the new permanent Constitution should be written, there is no guarantee that the new charter will put the country back on a peaceful and stable track.
Once the heated debate on how the Constitution should be drafted begins, Prayut will find it almost impossible to control the course of the discussions.
Nobody is quite sure where the prime minister stands on one of the most controversial issues in the drawing up of the new charter: How restrictive should the provisions against politicians who have been banned by the constitutional court be?
There have been suggestions by certain members of the National Reform Council that those who have been banned from politics for one reason or another should be barred from running for office for the rest of their lives. If that proposal were to pass, the scale will be tipped against politicians associated with former premier Thaksin Shinawatra.
Should that be the case, the political scene would undoubtedly heat up and the whole “reform” exercise would be seen to be designed to wipe out “the other side” from politics. Prayut has tried very hard to avoid being associated with that move. But then, he has also been critical of “populist policy” that has damaged the country’s social infrastructure.
His dilemma is clear. If Prayut wants to show that the seizure of power will “clean up politics”, he would have to support a charter that minimises “money politics”. But if he pushes too hard in that direction he might be accused of taking sides, and national reconciliation would be out of the question.
The real test will come on November 12 when the National Legislative Assembly takes up the question of whether to impeach former Premier Yingluck Shinawatra.
The fact that House Speaker Pornpetch Vichitcholchai said last week that there were sufficient legal arguments for him to put the motion on the House agenda has injected an atmosphere of confrontation even before the Constitutional Drafting Committee could pick all the 36 members.
Whether he likes it or not, Prayut will have to find a way of defusing that time bomb if he intends to produce a national reconciliation charter. If not, then it’s another story. And the question of whether he keeps to his deadline will become highly relevant.