Thailand has enjoyed a relative calm in the past few months. Political demonstrations have been orderly, and a string of bombs that shook the capital toward the end of 2010 did not continue into 2011. This lull, however, could be merely the calm before another storm.
In fact, with a general election scheduled for July 3, a distinct lack of fundamental change characterizes Thailand's faulty democratic system, offering scant hope for a political resolution to the country's longstanding fault lines in the short-to-medium term.
A key prerequisite for any definition of democracy is that elections decide who governs. In Thailand, however, it has been amply documented that this is not the case, with the military and the judiciary biased in favor of the conservative bloc that includes the royal family and the Democrat Party.