No actually they are. Remember that Thaksin was the richest man in Thailand and owned basically all of the media, and ran a very corrupt patronage machine. And the last election before his ouster was boycotted by ALL opposition parties because of how much election fraud he was responsible for and was obviously planning in this instance. As far as military coups go Thaksin's party put this guy in power briefly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samak_Sundaravej And in regards to being reactionary, remember the party used to be called "Thais Love Thais" and has a lot of "Thailand is for Thais!" rhetoric that if you change the nationalities could easily come from Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders or Jorg Haider.
And the Democrat Party has historically been the backbone of opposition to previous military regimes.
I agree that the opposition boycotted the election in 2006 but mainly because they knew they would lose and their claim that Thaksin lost the support of the general population would show up to be false. Even when the opposition were in the fray, Thaksin parties won landslides in 2001 2005 and 2011. Even in 2007 the pro-Thaksin PPP won although not with an absolute majority. The fact is the Thaksin machine is very effective a Clientelism regime in the rural hinderlands of Northern Thailand where the majority of the population lives. Fraud is really not a huge fact in the various Thaksin victories.
Samak Sundaravej was picked to lead the Thaksin PPP in 2007 mostly as a compromise to the royalist camp that Samak Sundaravej who has a history of supporting pro-royalist causes but since joined up with Thaksin can bridge the gap between the two political blocks.
