Tomorrow will probably be the most decisive day in Thailand after nearly a decade of military rule. The key question on everyone’s lips is: Will the conservative forces allow the young leader of the Move Forward Party (MFP), Pita Limjaroenrat, to become the next prime minister? And the question which naturally follows is: If Mr Pita is blocked, what will happen? Will people go out to the streets in protest? Will soldiers be sent to disperse them? Will the violence of over ten years ago, which led to the military’s ouster of a civilian government installed by popular vote, return to Bangkok?
A Very Fluid Situation
Optimism and pessimism, hope and fear co-exist among Thais these days, but with hope definitely in the ascendant. A sense of a new dawn for the country became unstoppable after the MFP unexpectedly won the most votes in the national elections on May 14. It won 151 seats, besting its coalition partner, the Thaksin family-controlled Pheu Thai Party, which raked in 141 seats. Left in the dust were the parties controlled by the ruling military regime that gathered a measly 76 seats.
The MFP’s rise was nothing short of mercurial. Founded just five years ago, in 2018, it came in third in the parliamentary elections of 2019. Then, coming in first in 2023, it won 14 million votes, or 40% of the votes cast, up from 13% in 2019. The MFP frustrated every legal manoeuvre that the military-controlled Constitutional Court threw at it. The Court disqualified Future Forward founder Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit from serving in Parliament, along with several other winners in the 2019 elections. The Court followed this up by dissolving Future Forward and banning its executives from politics for 10 years in February 2020, only to see it resurrected as Move Forward a month later, with a new leader, Pita, who declared that “Move Forward is the new chapter of Future Forward”.
Viewed in retrospect, however, these earlier hurdles were not as big as the challenge Move Forward now faces, which is the right to form the government and enact promised reforms to the country’s entrenched power structure. To be prime minister, Mr Pita must get 376 votes from the 750 members of the bicameral National Assembly. He already has 312 votes and needs 64 more from either rival parties in the Lower House or from the 250-person Senate, whose members were appointed by the military. Mr Pita says he already has the necessary 64 votes, but this may be part of the psychological warfare leading up to July 13.
The Establishment’s Dilemma
The military, though discredited, remains a powerful force. Other rival parties, such as the formerly influential Democrats, who suffered a stunning collapse to only 25 seats, may refuse to come to the aid of what they see as an upstart party. Another party, the Bhumjaithai Party, which fancies itself as a kingmaker, asserted that its 71 seats would not go to “the party that has a proposal to amend or abolish Section 112. The most decisive force that will shape the outcome of July 13 is the Senate, whose members were appointed by the military. The senators consider their role as the old guard of the kingdom’s three pillars — Nation, Religion, and the King. Although some senators have declared they will vote for the will of the people, others have announced that they could not support a party that advocates the “overthrow of the monarchy”.
The issue is MFP’s position on the notorious lese majeste law. While sympathetic to the youth-led protest movement’s demand that the royal defamation law be abolished, during the election campaign and after the May election, the MFP came out with a position that explicitly seeks reform rather than abolition of the draconian law that imposes long-term jail sentences on those judged to be insulting or defaming the royal personality. According to MFP MP Rangsiman Rome, the party’s position is to “reform the law, for instance, by stipulating that one cannot accuse a person of lese majeste simply by running to the police; this has to be done through a legal process handled by one government agency that carefully assesses the charge”.
Not surprisingly, some supporters of the MFP have been critical of its retreat on its distancing itself from its abolitionist position, while others have seen this as evidence of its pragmatic side, one that is necessary for it to govern a complex, fractured polity. It is likely that the party debate leading up to the new position was intense.
But whether the MFP’s position is to abolish or to reform the law, it will be the hand-picked senators, some observers contend, who will be the real kingmaker on July 13.
A New Era in Thai Politics
Whatever happens on July 13, Thailand has already stepped into a new era. The significance of MFP’s stunning victory at the polls has a number of dimensions.
The youth vote, that is, Gen Z and Millennials, made the difference in the electoral outcome. In this connection, it must be pointed out that opposition in the streets spearheaded by young people who defied the military, sporadically at first but more massively since 2017, created the context for the emergence of an electoral party whose parliamentarians have an average age of 39.
The extremely poor performance of the government coalition, along with that of traditional parties like the Democrats that cooperated with the generals, represented a decisive repudiation of military intervention in politics and a call for the generals to return to the barracks and stay there.
The MFP’s outstripping of its coalition partner, the Pheu Thai Party, as the country’s leading party, along with the extremely poor performance of the Democrats, may mean that, at last, the citizenry has moved beyond the “red” versus “yellow” divide that wracked Thailand before the coup of 2014. Pheu Thai had mobilised mainly the rural masses of the North and Northeast in support of Thaksin Shinawatra’s populist politics, while the Democrats had agitated Bangkok’s middle classes in support of the country’s traditional elites. During the May 2023 elections, in many areas, notably the North, Northeast, and Bangkok, significant numbers of former red and yellow antagonists found themselves together in the orange MFP camp. Observers cited many instances of families that had split for years into red and yellow factions uniting under the MFP banner. “There are no longer any reds or yellows in our family,” one Bangkokian told us happily. “We all voted for MFP.”
MFP ran a strikingly different campaign by focusing on issues and policies instead of appealing to people’s traditional personal or party loyalties. Unlike the other parties, it did not buy votes, and this was not only because it had no money to do so but out of principle and a conviction that people were tired of the old personalistic, clientelistic politics. Leading up to the May elections, the party assembled a program based on 300 policy positions, from military reform to LGBTQ rights to animal rights, seeking to show the electorate that it was a large tent that had a place for every voter’s special concern.
“We won the soldiers’ votes,” MP Rome told us at a briefing at the party’s headquarters, commenting on one of the more interesting electoral outcomes. “It showed that enlisted men and women agreed with our platform for military reform, which sought to create a truly professional army, where recruits would not be hazed, and people would advance by merit rather than by connections.”
Former MP Kunthida Rungruengkiat, who now heads MFP’s Progressive Movement Foundation, added, “I still remember one forum where one personality from a traditional party said, ‘MFP’s brand of politics is a threat to all of us old parties, whether of the government or opposition’. He was right.”
The Thai establishment is caught on the horns of a very big dilemma. It knows that depriving Pita of the prime ministership on July 13 will be a very costly move, one with consequences that are unpredictable but uniformly negative for it.
But even if it does manage to push back the tide one more time, it seems impossible for it to resist the momentum of the Move Forward Party much longer. It hears loud and clear the overwhelming message from the electorate, and that is: It is time to step aside for change.
Kheetanat Synth Wannaboworn and Walden Bello are members of the staff of the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.
