People in Thailand are accustomed to sudden changes of government brought on by military coups, numbering more than a dozen since the 1930s. But in the past two decades, they have increasingly seen such changes imposed by the courts, which have ousted four prime ministers and dissolved three election-winning political parties, often on narrow technical grounds.
Now anger – along with a sense of resignation – is brewing over the perceived heavy-handed involvement of Thailand’s nine-member Constitutional Court in the country’s fractious politics.
The court’s presence in political life has become so significant that experts say it has replaced King Bhumibol Adulyade – who died in 2016 – as the ultimate political arbiter in Thailand.
Anger flared on 7 August when the court dissolved the reformist Move Forward party (MFP), which won the most parliamentary seats in the 2023 election but was blocked from taking power, and whose progressive leader, Pita Limjaroenrat, has been banned from running for office for 10 years.
A week later, the court removed prime minister Srettha Thavisin for an alleged ethical violation regarding the appointment of a cabinet member. He has been replaced by Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the youngest prime minister in Thai history and a member of the prominent Shinawatra political family.
On Tuesday, Pita said that despite his ban and the break-up of Move Forward, his resolve to one day lead Thailand and enact major reforms was unbroken.
“We confuse movement with progress,” he told Reuters. “It’s almost like we’re going around in circles and we’re thinking we’re going somewhere, but actually we’re going nowhere.”
He told the news agency that elected politicians needed to reform institutions such as the courts to guarantee their independence and accountability to the public.
Mookdapa Yangyuenpradorn, human rights associate at Fortify Rights, worries that these actions – part of what she characterises as a decade-long trend of judicial overreach – will breed cynicism and discourage Thais from engaging with politics.
“There’s a feeling of hopelessness and numbness that drives people further away from involvement in politics and drives away trust in a functional democratic society,” she says.
Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a professor at Kyoto University’s centre for south-east Asian studies, said he believed people have been left with less respect for – and confidence in – the judicial system, while the court’s involvement in politics poses an existential threat.
“In any other country when you talk about the collapse of key institutions, one may collapse but the country survives, like France with the monarchy,” he says. “But in a country where the justice system collapses, it can’t survive, and that’s what I fear with Thailand. I think the judiciary is on the brink of collapse because of its politicisation.”
Yangyuenpradorn and Chachavalpongpun are far from alone in their concerns.
On Monday, 134 Thai academics and legal scholars issued a statement condemning the court’s recent decisions.
They argued that the constitutional court had overstepped its jurisdiction in an approach that “conflicts with the principle that laws restricting individual rights should be interpreted narrowly and with great caution”.
The court has not publicly responded to the recent criticisms against it.
Reform of the political system, including the judiciary, was a key policy of Pita’s now defunct party. Yangyuenpradorn hopes the People’s party – the party that the remaining Move Forward MPs have regrouped under – will preserve it as a policy.
Democracy will be unable to truly take root in Thailand until a consensus is reached on the courts’ overreach, political science researcher Napon Jatusripitak says.
“In what kind of democracy is a court … given the power to disfranchise 14 million voters by dissolving their chosen party and unseat a democratically elected prime minister, all within one week?”
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed to this report
