ข่าวกิจกรรม

ความเห็น ดร. ฐิติพล ภักดีวานิช ต่อนโยบายนายกรัฐมนตรี เศรษฐา ทวีสิน ใน TIME: "In 2011, Prime Minister Yingluck, Thaksin’s sister, launched a quixotic rice-pledging scheme promising to buy farmers’ rice at high prices while also selling them for a fat profit in the global rice market. It sparked a rice-growing craze in the agricultural sector only to flop spectacularly, burning a 518 billion baht ($13.5 billion) hole in the country’s economy. It also eventually led to Yingluck’s ousting by judicial coup amid charges of negligence. The fallout from the rice-pledging scheme has continued to linger, leaving her successors to deal with a sticky debt burden.

Srettha seems unlikely to repeat policy failures of such a scale, experts say, but his economic proposals are strongly reminiscent of the same Thaksin-style populism that puts political gain over economic soundness. The problem for Srettha, however, is that the Thai public today has already signaled it’s more interested in systemic, democratic reform than the type of economic promises Pheu Thai is accustomed to offering.

Why Srettha’s can’t seem to give the Thai people what they really want

Titipol Phakdeewanich, dean of the political science faculty at Ubon Ratchathani University, thinks Pheu Thai is “still in denial” over how far its platform of populist economic policies can go to salvage the party’s reputation, which first took a hit when Pheu Thai came in second in the May election that it had expected to win by a landslide. “If it would work, then they would have already won [by] a landslide with the [campaign promise of a] 10,000 baht digital wallet,” says Titipol."

https://time.com/6320754/thailand-srettha-populism/