Even before the military ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra on September 19, Thai democracy was in severe crisis. The country had suffered a succession of elected but do-nothing or exceedingly corrupt regimes. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), which for all intents and purposes ran the country with no accountability from 1997 to 2001, further eroded the legitimacy of Thai democracy by imposing a program that brought great hardship to the majority. Thaksin stoked this disaffection with the IMF and the political system to create a majority coalition that allowed him to violate constitutional constraints, infringe on democratic freedoms, and using the state as a mechanism of private capital accumulation.
The Thai Coup
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