Yellow vs. Red and the Rise of a New Middle Class in Thailand

Abstract

During the last two decades, Thailand's political climate had changed profoundly, resulting in an unprecedented divide between two fronts: the socalled Yellow Shirts (People's Alliance for Democracy, or pad) and the Red Shirts (United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship, or udd). Both parties are currently locked in an arduous conflict, with the Yellows initiating a mass mobilization to oppose the Reds who represent the anti-coup forces who have rallied around exiled Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his alleged 'nominee' governments. This divide is perhaps the first example of nationwide mass politics in Thai political history. It is no surprise, then, that this phenomenon has provoked both Thai and foreign academics alike to seek explanations for the emergence of these political mass movements. In this chapter I posit that this issue is not so much about clashes between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' , or elite conflicts carried over to the clientelist masses of supporters. I argue, instead, that we are looking at the coming-of-age of a new Thai middle class. This idea is supported by recent research on the socioeconomic characteristics of both the Reds and the Yellows. The Yellows are representative of the 'old' established middle and upper classes, who have been well integrated economically and politically with the elites since the 1970s. The Reds, on the other hand, are identified as the vanguard of an emerging class of lower middle-income, market-oriented earners, the product of Thailand's economic growth during the past two decades. It is this emerging class, and not the poor, that forms the majority of voters in Thailand's electoral system at present. The livelihoods of the members of this class depend crucially on market transactions, both in consumption and production, while the persistence of considerable economic inequality, together with the development of electoral politics at the national and local levels, has