BANGKOK - Activist lawyer Arnon Nampa sang a medley of folk songs at a Bangkok police station on Friday .
At least 60 protests have sprung up since May after restrictions to curb the pandemic were eased, according to the monitoring website Mob Data Thailand. They were held mostly in Bangkok but also as far as Chiang Mai, Pattani, Khon Kaen and Kanchanaburi provinces. But government spokesman Anucha Burapachaisri says it is not dismissing their demands."We are thinking of doing something but we want to do it the proper way," he told The Straits Times."Because there are so many groups, we have to identify what each is asking for."
Groups allied with Free People support its three basic demands, said the baby-faced Mr Tattep."You can demand many things, but whatever problems you have - be they related to the environment, the military or the monarchy - they can only be solved by first unlocking the Constitution." Generation Z, having come of age under a royalist military government that leaned on the country's oligopolistic conglomerates, blame their bleak future on the state of Thai politics.
The uproar it caused among royalists forced the deputy rector of Thammasat University to apologise. But it proved impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. Mr Anucha says legislators are drafting amendments to the Constitution which will be forwarded to the Speaker this coming week. But he declined to comment when asked about monarchy reform:"We have to be very careful about how to proceed."