Cause for (Some) Cheer

Through coconut groves and brown, fallow rice fields, along muddy canals and traffic-clogged boulevards, millions of Thais made their way to tin-roofed voting pavilions last week in the country's first genuinely free election. If the 40% turnout was disappointing, there was still cause for cheer that the balloting went off as smoothly as it did.

In the south, where 239 people lost their lives last month in the severest floods in memory, voters took to boats of every kind to get to the polls. In the remote northern provinces, villagers could be seen inching across the hills on elephants to cast their ballots. Along a canal near the Burmese border, a tiger leaped into a boatload of nine voters, seriously mauling one person before fleeing into the jungle. It was later hunted down by police.

Shaky Coalition. Aside from such scattered incidents, the election--like the campaign--was remarkably trouble-free. That may not be the case for the next government. The voters failed to give anything remotely resembling a majority to any of the 42 parties that fielded 2,191 candidates for the 269-member National Assembly. One Bangkok newspaper headlined: CONFUSION!

The next government will certainly be a coalition, and a shaky one at that. Although 20 parties failed to win any seats at all, the top ten picked up 243. But the seats were distributed in such a way that it will require a minimum of four parties to form even a slim majority. The middle-of-the-road Democrat Party, which headed the opposition to Thailand's military rule for three decades, led with 72 seats. Party Leader Seni Pramoj, while conceding that he "was heading straight for trouble," immediately announced that he would try to form a coalition with three or four other moderate and rightist parties. A likely coalition member is the right-wing Thai Nation Party, headed by Pramarn Adireksarn, 60, a retired major general and a prominent businessman. Late last week Seni said that he had gained 119 seats with the help of other parties, enough to form a minority government. Pramarn is considered the front runner to become Deputy Prime Minister.

Seni, 69, will have to cope with an inflation rate of 30%, land and labor reforms, and a cumbersome bureaucracy. A political moderate who served as ambassador to the U.S. during World War II and was Prime Minister once before for a brief period in 1945, he is a strong monarchist and a distant cousin of the King.

He has the backing of both conservative business interests and the National Student Center of Thailand, a potent political pressure group since the student-led rebellion that ousted Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn's military dictatorship in 1973. In foreign policy, he is expected to maintain close ties with the U.S. while developing better relations with China and the countries of the Third World.

Many Thais still fear that the military might try to move in should the new government prove hopelessly unstable and unable to govern. The key to the crucial months ahead may then conceivably lie with Thailand's popular young monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, 47, who could intervene and appoint a new civilian government, as he did during the critical days of the 1973 upheaval. Although Bhumibol has always remained carefully aloof from politics, he is the one figure who is respected by all political factions, from students and merchants to military men and peasants.

Royal Fatigues. The very model of a working King, he is governed by one overriding ambition: to bring his backward country into the modern world. On a recent visit, TIME Correspondent Peter Range found him decked out in combat boots and fatigues, a walkie-talkie slung over each shoulder, inspecting an experimental crop-substitution program among a Lahu hill tribe in northern Thailand.

"The constitution is not so important," he says. "It depends on what the government does for the people." The record has not been very encouraging since Thailand abolished its absolute monarchy in 1932: ten constitutions, eleven coups d'etat, dozens of plots and intrigues by political and military upstarts. But Bhumibol is optimistic. So is Narong Ketudat, editor and publisher of the left-wing daily Prachathipatai, who said after last week's election: "You have to begin somewhere --it's a start." Not too bad a start either.

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