Date set for Thai general election

Thailand goes to the polls in a general election on 3 July at a hugely sensitive time for the country one year on from an army crackdown on opposition Red Shirt rallies in Bangkok which left more than 90 people dead, mostly civilians. 

Reuters/Enny Nuraheni

The vote in the deeply divided nation is expected to be dominated by a battle between premier Abhisit Vejjajiva's elite-backed Democrat Party and the opposition allied to his arch-foe, fugitive ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra.

British-born Abhisit, whose term finishes at the end of this year, submitted the decree to the palace last week, gambling on the early and potentially volatile polls to secure him a second term and silence critics who say he has no popular mandate.

Abhisit's party is Thailand's oldest with a support base in Bangkok and the south, but it has not won a general election in nearly two decades and faces a struggle to cling to power, even with the backing of its coalition partners.

Parties linked to Thaksin have won the most seats in the past four elections, but the former tycoon was toppled in a 2006 coup and court rulings reversed the results of the last two polls. Many of the mainly rural, working-class Reds are loyal to Thaksin, who is considered the de facto leader of the opposition Puea Thai party despite living overseas to avoid a jail sentence imposed in absentia for corruption.

By law, polls must be held between 45 and 60 days after the house is formally dissolved by the monarch, the highly revered 83-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

Since last year's violence, the authorities have clamped down on Red Shirt media and last month police raided more than a dozen radio stations sympathetic to their cause.

The current army chief has ruled out a military coup, but that has not dampened speculation of possible army intervention in a country that has seen 18 actual or attempted coups since it became a constitutional monarchy in 1932.