Thai leader calls elections

BANGKOK - Desperate to defuse Thailand's deepening political crisis, Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra dissolved Parliament's lower house Monday and called early elections. But protesters seeking to topple her vowed to carry on their fight, saying they could not win the polls because of corruption.

A decree from King Bhumibol Adulyadej scheduled the elections Feb. 2 and named Yingluck as interim prime minister until then. The protesters demanded that she resign as caretaker and rejected the election date, putting the strongly royalist movement at odds with the royal decree.

Protest leader Suthep Thaugsuban, who faces an arrest warrant on insurrection charges, spoke to more than 150,000 followers at a stage outside Yingluck's offices, challenging authorities to "Come get me!"

He claimed his movement was assuming some functions of government, citing a clause in the constitution stating "the highest power is the sovereign power of the people."

He said a new prime minister and a nonelected "people's council," which has no basis in the constitution, would work to end corruption in politics and keep Yingluck and her brother, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, from returning to power.

The opposition Democrat Party, allied with the protest movement, has been defeated by Thaksin-allied parties in every election since 2001 and is unlikely to win the new polls.

Thaksin, a former telecommunications billionaire, was toppled by a 2006 military coup that laid bare a deeper conflict between Thailand's elite and largely urban middle class on one side, and Thaksin's power base in the countryside on the other.

The two sides have been dueling for power, sometimes violently, since Thaksin was ousted for alleged corruption and abuse of power.

Yingluck announced the Parliament dissolution in a televised speech that broke into regular programming.

Analysts say she may have had no alternative.