To recover their standing, ASEAN oligarchs have been forced into a range of new alliances and forms of legitimation. Thailand’s Thai Rak Thai (TRT) party forged a populist alliance between big business and the rural poor to displace the neoliberal Democrats to facilitate the capitalist elite’s direct return to power (Pasuk and Baker, 2004; McCargo and Ukrist, 2005). Elite strategies elsewhere have involved cultivating middle-class support by rhetorically embracing ‘good governance’ reforms and developing new forms of technocratic, and thus politically ‘safe’, participation. The success of such strategies varies considerably. Where opposition from below is very weak, this discourse is readily instrumentalised (Rodan and Jayasuriya, 2007). However, elsewhere, as in Malaysia, middle-class rage at oligarchs’ failure to deliver genuine reform has re-energised the reformasi movement (Surain Subramaniam, 2001; Case, 2005), resulting in UMNO’s worst electoral showing for four decades in 2008. President Arroyo’s government in the Philippines has also struggled to fend off charges of electoral fraud, corruption and human rights abuses (Abinales and Amoroso, 2005: 277-294). Although most Indonesian political parties remain ‘Trojan horses’ for oligarchs (Tan, 2006), reformist forces in Indonesia have also continued to struggle against the entrenched elite.