Thailand’s Juan Perón

A 26-minute campaign video, distributed recently to millions of rural Thai voters, spoke volumes about the strange state of politics there. The pitchman was none other than ex-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra—who remains wildy popular, despite his ouster by the military 15 months ago and pending corruption charges. Though barred from running in the Dec. 23 national elections, Thaksin was easily the most prominent figure in the race, so much so that his allies in the newly constituted People Power Party risked the generals' wrath by using him to campaign long distance. Polls predicted the strategy would help the PPP claim the biggest bloc in Thailand's 480-seat legislature.

The junta must have anticipated such antics from Thaksin, a charismatic 58-year-old telecom tycoon who won two landslide elections before being overthrown on Sept. 19, 2006. Ever since, the military has tried furiously to sideline him. But Thaksin, from exile in London and Hong Kong, has managed to reoccupy the leadership vacuum—belying his claim to have quit politics and underscoring the generals' failure to re-establish the old order in the country, under which they and the bureaucrats ruled supreme.

Thaksin may even soon manage to return to office. That's largely thanks to his sharp political skills, his abiding popularity and his compelling vision for Thailand's 70 percent rural majority. Economic growth slowed to about 4 percent in 2007, down from 6.4 percent in 2003, a level Thaksin managed to achieve while narrowing the rural-urban income gap. Now his maneuvers are increasing his resemblance to another iconic populist: Juan Perón, who ruled Argentina from 1946 to 1955, was exiled by a military junta, but then clawed his way back to power in 1973. "Per?n took 18 years to come back," says Christopher Bruton, a political-risk analyst for Dataconsult in Bangkok. "Thaksin thinks he can make that 18 months."

Like Perón, Thaksin came to power by shattering a long-established political order and energizing the dormant countryside with a raft of pro-poor policies. Thaksin managed to secure huge electoral majorities for his Thai Rak Thai party by doling out village-development loans, rural export schemes and various other brands of political pork. Dubbed "Thaksinomics," the programs infuriated the national bureaucracy, business elites, the military and ultimately King Bhumibol Adulyadej—who approved the Army's 2006 power grab.

As with Perón, Thaksin's enemies denounced him as a corrupt populist despot. In a counterintuitive twist, they even cast his ouster as a victory for democracy; as Anand Panyarachun, who was appointed prime minister after an earlier putsch, told NEWSWEEK in 2006, "a coup d'état in the Thai context is not like a coup in Africa or Latin America."

Whatever the case, the anti-Thaksin camp—an odd mixture of dyed-in-the-wool democrats, hard-core royalists and generals fond of their traditional power—quickly collapsed in the months after the coup. Clumsy policies to limit foreign participation in the economy spooked investors, growth slowed, and the scrapping of the progressive 1997 Constitution quickly turned the junta's leader, Gen. Sonthi Boonyaratglin, from a hero to a villain in the eyes of urban Thais. Rural voters also viewed the new order as a big step backward. "It was one thing to seize power, but entirely different to bring back the older Thailand," says Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University. "We are in the midst of a transformation that [the generals] can't come to grips with. The genie is out of the bottle."