KHON KAEN – Pheu Thai will win 80 of Isaan’s 126 constituency MP seats in the upcoming election, Northeastern Red Shirt leaders projected this past Sunday. Approximately 150 UDD provincial and district level leaders met at Khon Kaen University’s Mo Din Daeng Hotel to share their election forecasts and formulate their campaign strategies.

Accepting the status quo, while at the same time claiming to fight against it, comes with some contradictions for UDD/Phue Thai Party. This will not appease all factions of the red shirts. Despite rhetoric of resistance and lots of emotive and expressive language at mass gatherings, there is little indication of a combined longer term vision or even of an ideology on which to achieve democracy. Neither has there been any intellectual discussion about what form that “democracy” should take, other than an assumption that it must come from the ballot box; that it must be built on the aspirations of the majority electorate. But an election under the current “rules of the game” established post 19 September 2006 can at best only be a means of redistributing political and economic benefits and in establishing new power sharing arrangements.

A red-shirt woman was seized and taken to the police by guards of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship during the rally on Saturday when she was distributing leaflets containing information about Article 112, or the lèse majesté law, and royal assets.

As heard among many red shirts: “We are ready and waiting for the word”, ready for bringing about regime change through a democracy “revolution” (การปฏิวัติ), inspired by the recent events in Tunisia. The problem to most red shirts is that there are few real options remaining in the current repressive situation created by the governing regime. A “democratic revolution” is a mass movement which wishes to replace undemocratic and unelected regime with a democratic system of governance.