Thailand protests are only getting bigger

The protests started out as a hundred people or so, then it was a couple hundred, then it moved to multiple cities on a small scale and just a few days ago more than tens of thousands of people gathered at Thammasat University and even spilled over and occupied the grounds of the Grand Palace without permission.

Thankfully, nothing escalated into violence but I've seen this before and that is the likely next step.

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So what is everyone upset about? While it is almost cliche to say this at this point because it happens so frequently here in Thailand, they are mostly upset with Prime Minister Prayut, who himself assumed power in a coup d'etat years ago and then was re-elected in a "free election" that many, if not most people believe was rigged and that the votes were not even counted. It is easy to see why they feel this way as there were certain sub-districts in the country where more votes were tallied for Prayut than actually live in that sub-district. It's a bit suspicious, that's for sure.

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They are also calling for removal of the powers of the monarchy and if you ask me this was always going to happen because the new King doesn't have the respect that his father did who served as the figurehead and "father" of the country for more than 70 years. This lack of genuine respect for the new King came to an apex during the pandemic where rather than helping out his own country he escaped on his private jet to a luxury resort in Germany along with his entourage including dozens of concubines. This was just another example of a rather long list of "un-kingly" behavior that the monarch has exhibited over the years and since the respect for him mostly wasn't genuine in the first place, it was only a matter of time before people had the courage to speak up against the age-old system.

There is a very good reason why people are afraid to speak up about the Royal Family and that is the fact that lese majeste laws still exist in Thailand and publicly speaking ill of the Royal Family carries a sentence of 15 years in prison along with it. Most of the people at these rallies and especially the speakers were taking a great risk by doing so since it is still very much against the law.

The government isn't taking this lying down though, as more than 8,000 police officers were on hand during the scheduled protests as well.

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Most of the police were unarmed, but their stoic presence was felt and noticed by the people in attendance.

The crowd is calling for a rather long list of demands, many of which I feel are unlikely to be honored such as the removal of P.M. Prayut, the stripping of powers that the Royal Family has over the military, the removal of lese majeste laws, and the drafting of a new constitution. Basically they want to scrap everything and start over in a kind of similar fashion to every other one of these things that we see in Thailand every decade or so.

There is another protest scheduled for the 24th of September and it remains to be seen if this one will be even larger than the last. Personally, I think that a lot of this unrest is coming at the hands of Covid lockdowns and enforcement. It seems that everyone in the world is feeling a bit of the unease that the pandemic has brought to the forefront.