Fun facts about Thailand

The garuda, the emblem of Thailand

Thailand, unlike all of its neighbouring countries, did not get colonised by a European power, then cause a decades-long quagmire of war.

The Guinness Record holder for longest place name is

  Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Yuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Phiman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit. 

Translated, this is 

"The city of angels, the great city, the eternal jewel city, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarma".

Most Thais call it Krung Thep, and most foreigners call it Bangkok.

If that seems excessive, I would remind you that Britain's head of state is Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. And that isn't even counting her fifteen other regnal titles, hundred or so chivalric orders, the Duchy of Normandy, the Lordship of Mann, her four honorary doctorates or her position in the admiralty of Nebraska.

In fact, British readers may find some aspects of Thai politics failiar: it's a bi-cameral legislature, ruled over by a little old man with big glasses who has been on the throne for decades, who is head of the church, and who in theory has enormous amounts of power but has wisely not tested it out too often.

King Rama IX, Bhumibol Adulyadej. Image from Thailand's PR.

The King gets fair-to-middling reviews from foreign observers, and is extremely popular inside Thailand. Of course, it probably helps that under Thai law, the Sex Pistols would have got three to fifteen.

Thailand is having an election on Sunday (the 3rd), and it's very fraught. With a bit of luck I'll be able to tell you more about it this week.

Italy: Its own worst stereotype?

There's no election in Italy necessarily in the offing. It's like our system, where the PM picks the date, and they aren't legally required to have one for a few years yet. Nonetheless, the politics there are fascinating.

Italy's politics have generally been divided on a left-right basis, though the actual parties involved seem to morph and change every few years.

The current PM, as I'm sure you all know, is this guy:

Silvio Beerlusconi: Image from a funny blog post

I have previously described this man as a cross between Rupert Murdoch and Hugh Hefner. To complete the picture, I should say that he is in fact only in government through coalition with Lega Nord, who I would describe as being a sinister mirror-universe version of the SNP, if they'd been founded by Enoch Powell.

I am not the only one to give Silvio, at best, a two-star review. If the recent local elections and referendum are any guide, the bulk of the Italian electorate might also be getting tired of his shit.

The referendum might need some explanation: last year, the parliament passed, over bitter opposition, a law making Ministers immune from legal prosecution. This is good, because Silvio is a massive crook. His opponents managed to get it on to a national ballot, where 94.6% of people voted that being in office isn't reason enough to be above the law. The No campaign were particularly classy, trying just to drive down turnout to the point where the vote wouldn't be binding.

The Left is, as the Left loves to be, fragmented and ineffective.  There is, however, a rising star:

Nichi Vendola, in a an image that seems to be by Giovanni Dell'Orto

Overall, it would be hard for the two men to be more different:

	Berlusconi	Vendola
Background	Milan	Puglia
Regrettable shady past	Conspiracy to overthrow democracy	Communist
Totally dominates...	News media	Poetry
Position on sex	"It's better to like pretty girls than to be gay"	Actually, being gay is fine, and certainly better than 'berlusconismo'
Position on the Mafia	Ambiguous	Anti
Favourite name for each other	Unwashed gypsy-lovers	"the monstrous and extreme version of the Italian everyman"
Libyan Refugees	Send them back	Teach them glassblowing
Economic position	Business knows best	Water belongs to the people

Of course, the facet of Vendola that international media has found most saleable is that he is gay.

The situation of gay people in society, it seems to me, falls somewhere on this scale:

1. Sodom and Gomorrah
2. Unnatural Acts
3. Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name
4. Milk
5. Are you Being Served?
6. Will and Grace
7. Perry vs Schwazenegger
8. Incredulous Future Schoolkids

Britain, I'm happy to say, is edging into category seven along with Scandinavia, Canada and the Blue States (California, Vermont): the Red states, along with the US military, are being dragged unwillingly out of the 2/3 range. Italy seems to be trying to break from 5 into 6.

In some ways the situation has parallels with America in 2008. Vendola is charismatic, idealistic and good with words. Can Berlusconi, like Bush, be so terrible that his country is able to swallow its biggest hang-up for the sake of getting someone else?

Macedonia

There are three big elections on Sunday: Portugal, Peru and Macedonia. (Turkey is the week after). I have been completely unable to get excited about Macedonia, but to complete the diary here are some quick facts:

Image from Wikimedia

The Country is what I call a C-list european country: Not as good as Bulgaria or Hungary, but a heck of a lot better than Belarus or Russia. It shares that list with places like Bosnia, Turkey and Albania; I'd say Croatia has recently been promoted to the B-list and if everything goes to plan in Egypt and Tunisia they might claw up into the C-list.

There are good things about Macedonia. The economy's not too bad, and most people don't feel like there's a lot of corruption (less than in Italy or Greece, though more than Poland or Spain). I personally would love to go and take a look at it and eat some beans. One thing that might not be so much fun is that if, like for example the A1 television station, you say mean things about the government you might find that your neighbours have their taxes audited. In the middle of the night. By armed police.

Which leads us on to the second point, which is that the parliament is incredibly pissy. After the raid on A1-TV, all the opposition (centre-left) parties stormed out, declaring that they were going to their room and they weren't coming out until there was an election. The ruling (centre-right) party had an absolute majority anyway, but eventually got embarrassed trying to debate empty benches and called the election. I think their campaign slogan has been "Crybaby wants a bottle, wah wah wah".

So yeah. I don't know who'll win: in 2008 the government had a 25-point (!) lead over the opposition, which suggests it'd take some kind of miracle for them to loose; on the other hand, some of the very few polls knocking around have the Government, Opposition, Haven't Decided and Mind Your Own Beeswax all on about 20%. So, don't know.

But hey! Here's something interesting: Greece will veto Macedonia's entry to the EU unless they change their name.

See, when some people hear "Macedonia", they think of this:

Image from a site that says it's all macedonia

Clearly, if you're living in Salonica, you might get a bit nervous about maps that include your street in the next country over. There appear to be a lot more Greeks who believe their Slavic neighbours are itching to invade than there are Slavs who believe their country should rightly have a coastline, but that seems to be the nub of the issue.

There also seems to be some serious resentment among Greeks who think the Slavic Macedonians are horning in on the Alexander the Great heritage which rightly belongs to them.

Image from someone who is super-angry about the Skopje government misrepresenting the words of Strabo  (63 BC to 24 AD)

Mathematically speaking, this is a little bit silly. Greeks and Slavs are both all probably descended from any given individual alive at the time (though not Alexander himself, as his only son died without issue). For that matter, so are 99% of my readers (I make a possible exception for the visitors from Thailand, but definitely not those from Pakistan).

In any case, the effect has been that Skopje has tried to mollify Athens by changing their flag to look less like the ancient Macedonian one, and managed to get into the UN with the stage-name "The Former Yugloslav Republic of Macedonia". Lots of people don't like this, perhaps feeling it's a bit purple-motorcycle, which I can understand.

Much as I normally love wading into specious ethnic arguments, I don't really have a side here. On one hand, I support the idea that people can call their country whatever they like. Call it Atlantis if that's what turns you on, it'll have as much historical legitimacy as most founding myths. On the other hand, I can see why neighbours of country Wherever start getting nervous when it starts throwing around terms like Greater Wherever. Had I been in charge of Macedonia around the time Greece started kicking off, I probably would have said "Fine, our name is now the Republic of the Inhabitants of the Region Around the River Vadar, now can we please get up on some of those EU regional development funds because I am jonesing for real".

Portugal

Image from Wikimedia

Countries often have a vignette that encapsulates their understanding of their own history. For Americans, it's fording your prairie schooner over the Big Blue River. For the British, it's Phileas Fogg, certain in his ability to circumnavigate the globe with nothing more than a pocketful of Pound Sterling, a handlebar moustache and a firm attitude [pdf]. For the Spanish, it's Pizarro going buck wild in South America.

The equivalent symbol of the Portuguese golden age is Vasco Da Gama, pitching up on the shores of Malabar with a trunk full of merchandise and a prepared spiel about exciting business opportunities.

Image from wikipedia

At this time Portugal was really good at seafaring: I mean, super-good. In fact:

Portugal fact: That gold symbol on the flag is an armillary sphere.

I'll admit that I have a fairly shaky grasp of Portuguese history after the time that the rest of Europe cottoned on to the colonialism game. For example, I didn't know that Portugal had a fascist dictatorship, and I certainly didn't know it lasted until the nineteen-god-damned-seventies. To put that another way, when my dad started school, there were Western European countries that were literal, actual, secret-police, paramilitary gangs, Mussolini-but-not-as-historical fascist dictatorships.

The Carnation Revolution seems to be a pretty heartening precedent for the Arab Spring, since Portugal is now very democractic, very free, and overall a pretty good place to live (and yes, I will keep linking to that site until you all visit it).

It also has my favourite-named World leader: José Sócrates.

Image by Jose Sena Goulao

Socrates is very much on the bubble for keeping his job. I'm going back to my ancestral homelands for the bank holiday, so we'll take a look at the people trying to knock him off next week, before the actual election on Sunday.

Peru overview

"Viva El Peru" by Kareem Farooq

In the 1980s, Peru's reviews were pretty much all one-star. Hyperinflation, price controls and shortages meant that the economy was based on queueing, the Shining Path rebellion did basically whatever they wanted, and president Alan Garcia had approval ratings in the single figures.

Since then Peru's had a pretty incredible upward trajectory. Most people would now say it's not quite as good as Brazil or Chile, but better than Venezuela or Bolivia. On the 5th of June, they're electing a new President.

Peru for massive bluffers: "I would never have thought Fujimori could get out of her father's shadow, but it looks like it's coming right down to the wire. Best stay up on election night!"

Peru had its main election back in April, but the constitution requires that Presidents win at least 50% of the vote. No-one achieved this, so the country has had a few months to mull it over and are now having a run-off. The first round results looked like this:

Ollanta Humala	31.7%
Keiko Fujimori	23.5%
Pedro Pablo Kuczynski	18.5%
Alejandro Toledo	15.6%
Luis Castaneda	9.8%

By the by, looking at that list of names I would not be able to guess what country we're talking about or even what continent it's on.

I feel bad for dismissing them so briefly, but here are the basic summaries of the candidates knocked out in the primary.

Luis Castaneda: former mayor of the capital city, Lima. Ran for centre-right National Solidarity party, but never really got off the ground outside his home turf. Has a terrifying rictus for a grin. Peru's Rudy Guiliani.

Alejandro Toledo: Social liberal, economic centrist, president 2000-2006. Excellent president and legislator, terrible politician. He started the election campaign as the favourite, but that lead started to dry up when he started meeting people and going on TV. Will now have to fall back on his day jobs, which are professor of economics, senior fellow of the Brookings Institution, and consultant for the UN, OECD and World Bank.

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski: Toledo's former finance minister: somehow got the nomination from the right-wing Christian People's party and despite that ran a highly centrist, technocratic campaign. His performance in the first round was unexpectedly good, and the first sign he was getting votes from anyone who didn't read the business pages and political blogs.

So anyway, on to the real contenders:

Image from keikofujimori.com/

I skipped a few years back up ahead. What happened between Peru's late-eighties calamity and the league-average democracy we see now? Well, cometh the hour, cometh the man: much as happened in Colombia, they elected a strongman. Alberto Fujimori looks like a little old Japanese man and that's because he is. However, that didn't stop him telling Peru that he was counting to three, and that Peru should look him in the face because he wasn't joking.

Alberto took an axe to the well-meaning market interventions that had screwed up Peru's economy and, after the "Fujishock", business started up again. He was also undeniably effective at dealing with the Shining Path, albeit that he used the army to suspend Congress and rewrote the constitution in the process.

A few years back, Alberto expressed an interest in running this year. Why isn't he doing that? Well, because he's serving a 25-year jail term for ordering extrajudicial killings, orchestrating kidnappings and flamboyant corruption.

Keiko's campaign platform:

• Reduce regulation on businesses and reduce cost of doing business by 20%
• Simplify tax regime, decrease taxes on enterprise and increase them on mining windfalls
• Build prisons and increase the types of crime that carry the death penalty
• Economic priority is strong growth (>7% year)
• "Mechanisms of coercion and control"
• Maybe or maybe not a presidential pardon for Dad.

Image from Omni-Bus.com

In the dying days of the Fujimori presidency, Ollanta Humala was part of a military uprising against the government. Ollanta himself later got a congressional pardon, but his brother is, in fact, serving 25 years for kidnapping and murder associated with the uprising. Peru certainly has election fever right now, but all things considered it's amazingly civil.

Humala's power base is in the rural poor; he's from the indigenous Quecha people (named after an Inca general, no less) and his father was in the Communist party. In past elections he's very much played the left-wing populist, declaiming into a microphone while wearing a red t-shirt. He even got an endorsement from Hugo Chavez. Of course, many people live their life based on doing the opposite of whatever Hugo Chavez recommends,and that endorsement probably killed his last campaign.

Humala has apparently learnt the lesson and is now dancing the andean version of the Potomac shuffle, hard. He's bought a suit and tie and started talking about the independence of the Central Bank.

Ollanta's campaign platform:

• Public ownership of basic services like water and sanitation
• Decrease sales tax and increase tax on mining companies
• Tight control over budget deficits and inflation
• Economic priority is reducing poverty rates and increasing equality
• Create a High Commission for Peace and Development, who will award compensation for victims of violence over the last decade
• Maybe or maybe not a presidential pardon for Bro

So, who'll win?

It's hard to say. For most of the time since the first round they've been neck-and-neck, with a high number of undecideds. The centrists and technocrats all fell at the first round, leaving their supports to choose between hard right and hard left; or, in the tasteful words of a prominent public intellectual, like choosing between AIDS and Cancer.

Humala has been trying to convince socially liberal Toledo supporters that he won't go around collectivizing things for fun, and Fujimora is certainly not making any play for voters who support gay rights. What Fujimora has done, apparently, is distance herself from her father's negatives (suspending congress, death squads) while holding on to his law-and-order credentials.

Back in the parliamentary elections, Humala's party (Gana Peru) got the most seats, and would probably have the easiest time building a coalition. On the other hand, the most recent polls seems to show a movement to Fujimora. The lead now is larger than the sampling error, but smaller than the number who say they'll spoil their ballots. Both sides are campaigning flat out to get the last few undecideds.

Since Humala's base is in the more remote rural parts of the country, I think we'll either see Fujimori declare victory early on election night, or Humala grind out a win in the last ballot box to be counted.

Turkey- Overview

Turkey-fact to use at parties: The American bird is named after the country because similar birds (now called Guinea fowl) used to be bought into Europe via the Ottoman empire. In Turkey, they're called India, and in parts of India, they're called Peru.

Turkey-fact for massive bluffers: "After the constitutional referendum last year, I think Erdogan has it in the bag. Turkey has certainly come on in leaps and bounds under the AKP, but ironically I don't think their European aspirations will come to much until the opposition find their feet again".

(Image from Visit2Istanbul.com)

Turkey one hundred years ago can basically be summed up by doing a Google image search for "sultan". The Ottoman Empire somehow managed to last for centuries, despite having a system that often lead to the head of state being a) inbred and b) raised in solitary confinement. Everyone was firmly of the opinion that the empire was just about to collapse from about 1650 through to 1923, when it finally did. The new revolutionary republic decided to move away from the last few centuries of the Sultan eating sherbet, sitting on exquisite silk cushions, and watching himself having sex in a mirror while making horse noises. Instead, they looked at what Europe and America had done since their 1820, and reckoned they could do the same.

Turkey today is an interesting place. Almost everyone is at least nominally Muslim, but the constitution is extremely strongly secular. Turkey sees itself as an integral part of Europe, and the rest of Europe is divided on the issue. The country is changing extensively, rapidly and dramatically. Turkey might become a model of European-level prosperity and freedom for the Muslim world, or it might collapse in on itself.

Image from a site specialising in weird football wallpapers

In about a month, Turkey is having a general election. Over the next few posts, we'll take a look at the contenders and examine the odds. We'll find out where they're coming from and what they're for. We'll see who's watching anxiously and who's already pissed off about it. I don't want to give too much away, but there are also hints of military conspiracies and one of the weirdest publishing phenomena I've ever heard of.