Is Iran More Democratic Than Thailand?

Nobody has yet appointed a color to Iran's street revolution, but the storyline of angry supposedly pro-democracy demonstrators is now familiar, and in many instances represents a graver threat to democracy than the supposedly authoritarian leaders they are protesting against.

Vladimir Putin's election triumphs in Russia have been widely lamented by opposition critics and foreign media, who have claimed he aims to become a new age Czar or latter-day Stalin bent on reestablishing the Soviet empire. Hugo Chavez's election wins in Venezuela have likewise been lamented by some outside the country due to his populism and export of anti-American policies in Latin America.

But it is in Thailand, where angry street mobs have for the past three and a half years challenged the legitimacy of successive democratically elected governments, that the structural parallels are starkest with Iran. Former Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra, who notched two thumping election victories and a legally contested third, was criticized by his detractors for establishing a parliamentary dictatorship through his consolidation of power and was toppled in a 2006 coup.

In a true democracy, an elected leader does not lose his legitimacy just because he is opposed by powerful minority forces, nor do those forces have the right to extra-constitutionally remove a democrat leader.

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