Thai govt launches crackdown on opposition, chaos looms

The embattled Thai government today launched a crackdown against the opposition seeking to dissolve the Democrat Party as 19 top protest leaders faced arrest for violating an emergency decree during disputed snap polls, further deepening the long-running political crisis.
The Criminal Court approved the government's request for arrest warrants against Suthep Thaugsuban and 18 others and said there was sufficient evidence to confirm the activists had violated the emergency decree.
The arrest of each of the 19 suspects must be reported to the court in 48 hours, the Bangkok Post reported.
Seeking to quell months-long street rallies, beleaguered government of premier Yingluck Shinawatra imposed the 60-day emergency in Bangkok and some surrounding areas thereby banning political gatherings of more than five persons.

But protesters, backed by the Democrat Party which had boycotted the February 2 polls, continued their marches across Bangkok and blocked major intersections as part of their more than three-month long campaign seeking to oust Yingluck, install an unelected People's Council and scrap the polls.
The ruling Pheu Thai Party filed a petition asking the Election Commission (EC) chairman to dissolve the Democrat Party and ban its executive committee members from politics for five years. The EC secretariat accepted the petition.

Pheu Thai spokesman Prompong Nopparit claimed core members of the anti-government People's Democratic Reforms Committee (PDRC) had coordinated their activities with 25 leading members of the Democrat Party.

The move came a day after the opposition filed a petition in the Constitutional Court to invalidate the protest-plagued polls and disband the ruling party.
"I submitted the petition...The court will inform us later if they take the case or not," the Democrat Party lawyer, Virat Kalayasiri, has said.
The opposition party said it would launch four more legal challenges against the caretaker government accusing it of having illegally held the election.
Unfazed by the mounting challenges, the government has claimed "victory" in the election. The EC today put the nationwide voter turnout for the polls at 46.79 per cent, which excluded the nine southern provinces where voting was cancelled.

With the two sides determined to take each other head on, Thailand is likely to slip deeper into political chaos that has wracked the country for years.
The ongoing unrest is the latest flareup in years of political dispute that has pitted Bangkok's middle class, southern Thais and the royalist establishment against the mostly poor, rural supporters of Yingluck and her fugitive brother Thaksin Shinawatra.