Somchai Wongsawat: Seventy-Five Days and a Rear Fence
On 7 October 2008, the Prime Minister of Thailand delivered his policy address to a parliament ringed by protesters in yellow shirts and then left the building by climbing over a fence at the back. His government decamped to Don Muang airport. By the end of that day two people were dead and 471 injured. Somchai Wongsawat had been in office for nineteen days, and he would last another eight weeks. Almost nothing else about his career had prepared anyone, least of all him, for it.
The Judge from Nakhon Si Thammarat
Somchai Wongsawat was born on 31 August 1947 in Amphoe Chawang, in the southern province of Nakhon Si Thammarat, to Choem and Dap Wongsawat. He was schooled locally and then at Amnuay Silpa School in Bangkok, took his bachelor of laws from Thammasat University's Faculty of Law in 1970 and qualified as a barrister-at-law. Much later, in 2002, he added a master's in public administration from the National Institute of Development Administration.
Twenty-Six Years on the Bench
He became an assistant judge in 1974 and then spent a quarter of a century doing the least glamorous work in the Thai state: provincial courts in Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, Phang Nga, Rayong, Chon Buri and Nonthaburi. He was appointed a judge of the Appellate Court of the Third Region in 1993 and chief of the Appellate Court of the Second Region in 1997. On 11 November 2000, under Chuan Leekpai's government, he became Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice — the most senior civil-service post in the Thai legal system. In March 2006 he moved sideways to be Permanent Secretary of Labour, and that September he retired at pensionable age. He was fifty-nine, and by every ordinary measure his working life was over.
The Shinawatra Connection
It was not, because of whom he had married. His wife, Yaowapha Shinawatra, is the sister of Thaksin Shinawatra and of Yingluck Shinawatra, both of whom would serve as prime minister. The month Somchai retired from the civil service, the army removed Thaksin in the coup of September 2006. When the Thaksin movement reconstituted itself as the People's Power Party and won the parliamentary election of December 2007, Somchai came in with it as Minister of Education and senior Deputy Prime Minister — a retired judge with no electoral base, elevated by a family name.
Seventy-Five Days
The premiership fell to him by attrition. Samak Sundaravej, the People's Power leader who had become prime minister, was forced from office by the Constitutional Court. On 17 September 2008 the National Assembly elected Somchai with 298 votes against 163 for Abhisit Vejjajiva, and King Bhumibol Adulyadej formally appointed him Thailand's twenty-sixth prime minister the following day.
He inherited a street war. The People's Alliance for Democracy — the yellow-shirt movement that had been agitating against Thaksin and his successors — treated Somchai's appointment as proof that the coup had achieved nothing, and set out to make the country ungovernable. On 7 October they blockaded parliament to stop him delivering his policy statement. The police dispersal that followed killed two protesters, one a young woman, both by exploding tear-gas grenades, and injured 471 more. It was the defining event of his government and, in the end, the only one most Thais remember.
Dissolution
The end came from the bench he had spent his life serving. On 2 December 2008 the Constitutional Court dissolved the People's Power Party for electoral fraud — vote-buying committed by a party official, Yongyuth Tiyapairat — and banned Somchai and the rest of the party executive from politics for five years. He had governed for seventy-five days. In the weeks before the ruling he had also been under investigation over shareholdings in the telecoms company CS LoxInfo, and the National Counter Corruption Commission had found that, as Permanent Secretary of Justice in 2000, he had suspended a corruption investigation into senior officials.
Nine years later the courts came back to him. In 2015 the anti-corruption commission charged Somchai, Deputy Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, the former national police chief Patcharawat Wongsuwon and the former Bangkok police commander Suchart Mueankaew over the October 2008 dispersal. On 2 August 2017 the Supreme Court's Criminal Division for Holders of Political Positions acquitted all four by eight votes to one, finding that they had discharged a constitutional duty in clearing access to parliament, that the protest had not been peaceful — demonstrators carried weapons and used slingshots — that the police had followed a graduated response protocol, and that the defendants "could not have foreseen that the tear gas used against the protesters would harm them."
Why Somchai Is Called a Genius
He is not, and the record does not support the word in any conventional sense. He produced no idea, no reform and no doctrine; his seventy-five days in office are remembered for a single afternoon of tear gas and a fence. Anyone building a case for exceptional ability has to build it out of the twenty-six years before politics found him, and that case is narrower but genuine.
Somchai rose from an assistant judgeship in 1974 through benches in six provinces to the appellate courts of two regions and then, in 2000, to Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice — the top of the Thai legal civil service. That is not a path anybody walks on charm. It requires technical command of the law, unglamorous consistency over decades, and the trust of successive administrations of different colours. If there is a distinctive quality in Somchai it is judicial temperament: the capacity to work slowly and correctly inside a system, which is exactly the quality that made him useless in the crisis he was handed.
The counter-case is larger. He reached the premiership because he had married Thaksin Shinawatra's sister, not because anyone voted for him to lead; the anti-corruption commission found he had shelved an investigation into senior officials while running the justice ministry; his party was dissolved for buying votes; and the deaths of 7 October 2008 happened on his watch, whatever the Supreme Court later concluded about foreseeability. The honest summary is competence in one arena and drowning in another — a good judge placed, by marriage, exactly where Thailand's two irreconcilable factions collided.
Legacy
Somchai's fall closed the second act of Thailand's post-coup crisis and opened the third: Abhisit Vejjajiva formed a government in December 2008, and the yellow-shirt victory of that winter produced the red-shirt reaction that would dominate the following decade. Somchai served his five-year ban and lived on the edge of the Shinawatra story, a family that has supplied Thailand with prime ministers but never with a settlement. His acquittal in 2017 restored his legal standing; nothing has restored his political one.
Achievements
- Minister of Education of Thailand (2008–2008)
- Prime Minister of Thailand (2008–2008)
- Minister of Defence of Thailand (2008–2008)
- leader (2008–2008)
- Grand Cordon of the Order of the White Elephant — 1997
- Grand Cordon of the Order of the Crown of Thailand — 1992
- Chakrabarti Mala Medal — 1999
- Boy Scout Citation Medal of Vajira — 2008
- Educated at Amnuay Silpa School and Thammasat University
