🇹🇭 Paetongtarn handily survives for another day

Hello friends!

Late night update because I’m in Canberra but on Jakarta-time watching the demos we talked about earlier in the week continue to play. Right now, there’s a smallish gathering at the Parliamentary complex in Jakarta but they seem to be locked in for awhile. One to watch! 

Still, we better not miss the two other stories of the week. Paetongtarn Shinawatra survives a no confidence vote in Bangkok and Prabowo Subianto’s terrible week (month?) in Indonesia continues with a plunging rupiah.

See you next week!

Erin Cook

🇹🇭 The Paetongtarn v People’s Party showdown

Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra lives to see another day after sailing through the first no confidence motion of her premiership. Surely, there will be more to come. Everyone bangs on about the coups but Thailand also has an unusually high number of no confidence motions in recent years.

It comes about a month after the People’s Party said the PM was unfit to serve due to serious knowledge gaps and the ever presence of her father, former prime minister/former exilee/current gad about Asean Thaksin Shinawatra. “The prime minister has let subordinates to have control over her and has let her father lead and persuade (her) and get involved in national administration,” People’s Party leader Natthaphong Ruengpanyawut said last month, as per the Bangkok Post. 

There was no real risk she’d lose the gig. The coalition backing Pheu Thai is dominant and coalesced behind her with 319 votes compared to 161 against (thought the Nation has it at 162) and seven abstaining, the Associated Press reports. But it did give the opposition — especially People’s Party, the phoenix of Future Forward — two days to lay in on the government, Paetongtarn and her father Thaksin Shinawatra

People’s Party’s Rangsiman Rome really went for it. He said Paetongtarn and Pheu Thai had made a “devil’s deal” by entering into a coalition with military-aligned parties to bring back Thaksin. He also went after Thaksin for his “illness” that had kept him confined to a hospital and not a jail cell upon his return.

“Thaksin has not spent a single night in jail due to the prime minister and her allies cutting a deal that exchanged national interests for personal gain, thereby undermining the rule of law and the judicial process,” Rangsiman said, as reported by the Nation. 

I’m just going to quote Ken Lohatepanont in full here, because I can’t believe this happened: ‘The Prime Minister went on the attack, accusing Rangsiman of being a former anti-Thaksin yellow shirt protestor (Rangsiman denied this) and declaring that Thaksin had come out of his own volition and had been genuinely ill. She also said that she is a “daughter who loves her father and one hundred percent Daddy’s Girl.” (Yes, that is a quote). She also noted that Pheu Thai had always voted for the Future Forward and Move Forward prime ministerial candidates, but Move Forward never agreed to vote for a Pheu Thai candidate.’  

Which is a very succinct paragraph, isn’t it! It’s half of the whole damned story in just a few lines. Still, with such a huge margin in favour, Paetongtarn isn’t going to sweat it. 

“Every vote, whether in support or in opposition, is a force that will drive me and the Cabinet to continue to devoutly work for the people,” Paetongtarn said after the vote. She is an expert at deploying meaningless platitudes. I wish she’d just say something real for once! Even a gloat! Give us something, Paetongtarn. 

🇮🇩 Down, down, down

The Indonesian rupiah fell through the floor on Tuesday, reaching a low of 16,640 to the USD. That’s a level not seen since the Asian Financial Crisis that ripped through the region in 1997-98 and was a major factor in the fall of Suharto. Yikes! 

Bank Indonesia would not confirm if it had intervened Wednesday as the rupiah stayed super low but Fitra Jusdiman, Bank Indonesia's director of monetary and securities asset management, told Reuters that ‘BI always monitored the market and was ready to step in to support the rupiah.’ 

A rupiah slide is often seen as psychologically damaging, more than anything. It hasn’t gone this low since the financial crisis and there is a whole lot of kids getting beaten up by police in the streets, but, the central bank stresses, from their perspective this isn’t 1998. “The situation now is completely different and we are not at all as vulnerable as we used to be,” Solikin M. Juhro, head of Bank Indonesia’s macroprudential policy department, told media Wednesday, as reported by Bloomberg. 

For one, inflation is nowhere near ‘98 levels, while growth is stable and the books are balanced, he said. Bloomberg points to the combo of international and domestic factors — President Prabowo Subianto’s legislative agenda is a period of flux, while the dramas of the United States has wreaked havoc on emerging markets.

(Only tangentially related, but how bad is it that you can’t just Google ‘1 USD to IDR’ anymore? I swear Google would just tell you up the top what the most recent exchange rate is and it’s not there anymore. The internet sucks now!)