I'm American, but living in Thailand. Here there are two main parties:
Thai Rak Thai (TRT), which roughly means 'Thais love Thais' or 'the Thai people love Thailand'. As you can tell by the name this is the party of unreasoning patriotism and xenophobia. This is a huge and electorally dominant monstrosity with a horrible demogogue at its head - the Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a corrupt media billionaire(USD) and Thailand's richest man. This party is right wing economically and poses as the party of 'traditional values'. This would be were you would fit in, Colin.
The other major party, is known to English speakers as the Democrat Party. It is basically a liberal party in the American sense as far as tax polcy and redistribution, though with a fairly open and economically Liberal philosophy as far as trade and investment. It is very analagous to the Democrats in the USA - the Thai 'Democrats' used to pretty much run things before the 1997 financial crisis, and nearly every university professor is a member. Very much the party of the educated/professional elite, while TRT is the party of a) Plutocrats, and b) angry, ignorant country people.
Amazing the similarities - incidentally, Thailand has a comparable GINI Index to the USA - Thailand = 41.4, USA = 45. America is actually more unequal than this middle income third world nation! (source - CIA World Factbook -
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook)
The similarity to the USA breaks down in that there are several smaller parties in parliament, but all are relatively unimportant and I think all but one side with TRT. In any case I know nothing about them except that they are regional as opposed to national parties.
