Ken Lohatepanont

There were few topics on which more ink was spilled than our vaccine procurement program in 2021. Many feared at the start that the vaccination campaign would either go nowhere or that it would falter.  Now that we have entered 2022, it’s worth taking a look back at how Thailand’s vaccine strategy truly turned out.  […]

On December 15, Deputy Prime Minister Wissanu Kruea-ngarm delivered an abnormally early new year’s message. He also included an unusual line, especially for the minister in charge of legal affairs: there may be “political changes” next year.  What could he possibly be talking about? Difficult to tell as it may be, 2022 does promise to […]

Governing, it is said, is the art of compromise, of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, of settling for the next best. In few years, it would seem, has compromise as an art of governing looked so unpalatable than in 2021.  Turn the clock back a little. At the end of 2020, […]

Some offers are made to be rejected. That seems to have been the case for the constitution reform proposal presented by the Re-Solution group, which recently fell on its first reading in parliament. There was, despite Re-Solution’s protests to the contrary, never much doubt about the chances of its passing. The wide-ranging constitutional draft would […]

The past year has seen a steady stream of local elections: the Provincial Administrative Organization elections last December, municipal elections in March, and the Tambon Administrative Organization elections due soon.  There remains, however, a glaring absence: there is still no date scheduled for the election that will decide Bangkok’s next governor.  The delay has become […]

Back in late June, three Singaporean ministers sitting on the city-state’s COVID-19 task force wrote an article in The Strait Times entitled “Living normally, with Covid-19.” In the piece, the ministers outlined a roadmap for Singapore to “transit to a new normal.” The coronavirus, the ministers explained, must be accepted as an endemic disease, one which “may […]

After an unpopular one-year tenure, Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide of Japan announced that he would not contest the upcoming race to be president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Why did Suga step down? What happens next?  Here’s a quick primer on the state of Japanese politics. Click here for the full piece at Thai […]

“There is no elegant way to lose a war,” Fareed Zakaria wrote last week in the Washington Post.  Of course, to describe the US withdrawal from Afghanistan merely as inelegant would understate the reality rather significantly. News stories from Afghanistan was dominated by images of the gut-wrenching images of the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding, along with […]

This year, Thailand was given a score of 70.9 in the latest Fragile States Index, a ranking that seeks to measure a state’s vulnerability to collapse. The score placed Thailand 82nd out of 178 countries — a middling score, one could say, and perhaps unworthy of much further discussion. How much worth, after all, can […]

Governor Weerasak Wijitsaengsri of Samut Sakhon recently announced the expediting of the process in which COVID-19 patients in the province could be transferred to community facilities to await hospital treatment. In the past, the governor explained, a number of official regulations had made such a transfer a lengthy process. Now, however, these regulations were to […]