BANGKOK — For four months, Thailand has been convulsed by a political fight over a former prime minister who hasn’t set foot in the country since 2008.
On Saturday, the nation dared to hope there might be a break in the conflict.
A top anti-government leader said he was drastically scaling back demonstrations in the capital, where protesters have blocked off downtown intersections, pitched tents in front of luxury malls and called for the prime minister’s downfall.
At least 20 people have been killed in gunfire, grenade explosions and clashes with police since the movement’s rise in November.
The demonstrations will continue at a single site. The protest leader, Suthep Thaugsuban, characterized his move as a change in tactics and vowed to “reach the endgame” this month.
The protests take aim at Thailand’s most divisive figure, Thaksin Shinawatra, a telecom billionaire who served as prime minister from 2001 until 2006.
During that time, Thaksin lifted millions in the countryside from poverty with spending programs. He also elbowed aside the dominant Bangkok elite, concentrating power in a group of cronies and family members while browbeating institutions that went against him.
In doing so, Thaksin challenged a centuries-old power balance, creating tensions between Thailand’s mostly rural north and a more urban group of power holders.
Even if Suthep’s protest movement fades, those tensions remain unresolved.
The latest turmoil is particularly worrying because Thailand’s revered king, long seen as a guarantor of relative order, appears too old to intervene. The fear is not so much a coup but the division of the country.
“There’s no mediator,” said Suphachai Jaismut, a deputy secretary general of a small Thai political party that has in the past formed coalitions both with Thaksin and his opponents.
Suphachai nodded at a portrait of King Bhumiphol Adulyadej, 86, who has ruled for the past six decades. “It’s a street fight,” Suphachai said.
Protesters say that Thaksin, in between rounds of golf, runs the country as a puppet master from his home in Dubai, using his sister — the current prime minister — as a proxy.
So opposed are the protesters to Thaksin, they interfered with an election last month that would have presumably returned his sister to power. Until the election is completed — and there’s no guarantee it will be — the sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, is a caretaker. She is unable to sign off on government projects. Thailand is without a legislature.
Suthep launched the street protests in November when Thailand’s lower house, heavy with Thaksin supporters, tried to ram through an amnesty bill and bring him back home. Those efforts were then stalled by the nonpartisan Senate.
At its height, the protest movement drew 200,000 people, but it dwindled in recent weeks amid the violence. On Saturday, anti-government protesters retreated from their blocked-off Bangkok intersections and assembled at a park normally filled with joggers and sunbathers.
The next move in Thailand’s struggle is difficult to predict, with both the protest movement and the government weakened.
The protest movement “blocked seven intersections for several months, and it did not produce a result,” Somkiat Onwimon, a former member of Congress who has spoken at some of the protests, said Saturday. “So Suthep might have thought all this was going to be in vain.”
“But after all this, I don’t think either side has the upper hand,” Somkiat said.
