HONG KONG -- Thailand's "democracy" is in limbo. Judges of the country's three top courts have decided that April's elections were unconstitutional, and new ones must be held. The Election Commission set October for new elections, but the judges said the commission has no power to set the date and its members must resign, which they have refused to do.
Meanwhile, Thaksin Shinawatra, the billionaire tycoon at the center of the storm of allegations that he hijacked democracy, has quietly resumed his job as caretaker prime minister, only days after telling off reporters for bothering him, an unemployed man.
Thaksin is hardly the first or the only "strongman" ruler strutting the stage in Asia. Sukarno, and after him Suharto, in Indonesia and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines indeed set a pattern. If you extend the definition of a strong ruler to include a party monopoly, then most of the Asian region from Myanmar (also known as Burma) through China follows the tradition of a strong executive government.