PATHUM THANI: Chonthicha “Lookkate” Jangrew is going door-to-door asking people to vote for her in the May 14 election even though she faces possible jail time on charges of sedition and royal defamation stemming from protests in 2020.
The 30-year-old is one of more than a dozen activists from a student-led protest movement who are taking their once-taboo cause from the streets to the ballot box as candidates in the election.
They are bringing the issue of the role of monarchy in society into the open, even though doing so carries great risk. A conviction under Section 112 of the Criminal Code, the lese-majeste law, is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Anyone can make a criminal complaint and police are obliged to investigate.
Changing — though not abolishing — the royal defamation law is part of the platform of the Move Forward Party, for which Ms Chonthicha is running. It proposes to reduce the severity of punishments and also says that only the Bureau of the Royal Household should be allowed to file complaints.
“If you want to make a change in Thailand, you cannot rely solely on street movements or only on parliament,” Ms Chonthicha told Reuters in an interview as she took a break from campaigning in Pathum Thai.
“Both paths need to move forward together,” she said.
The 2020 demonstrations that started as opposition to the military’s domination of politics following the 2014 coup and a disputed election five years later, broke ground by also raising questions about the supremacy of the monarchy.
The protests were eventually suppressed, largely by legal action against their leaders, with hundreds arrested and facing criminal cases that are still working their way through the courts.
Ms Chonthicha said she has 28 criminal cases against her, including two of lese majeste, which would end her parliamentary career if she were to win a seat. Anyone convicted of an offence is disqualified from the House of Representatives.
According to data from Thai Lawyers for Human Rights (TLHR) to March 31 this year, 1,898 people have been prosecuted for political participation and expression since the beginning of the Free Youth pro-democracy protests in July 2020. At least 237 are facing lese-majeste charges and 130 have been charged with sedition.
The youngest detainee is a 15-year-old girl who was arrested on March 28 in connection with a protest in Bangkok a year earlier. She has refused to recognise the jurisdiction of the court and is being held in a juvenile detention centre.
Biggest change in decades
Analysts say that many of the issues the youth movement raised are now part of mainstream discourse, including calls to amend the lese-majeste law.
Dozens of activists, like Ms Chonthicha, have joined political parties like Move Forward, Pheu Thai and Thai Sang Thai, either as candidates or workers, said Kanokrat Lertchoosakul, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University.
Ms Kanokrat said the protests had also put issues such as LGBT rights and the ending of the military conscription on the agenda.
Move Forward spokesman Rangsiman Rome said the party was a good fit for the young people who joined the 2020 protests that were rooted in opposition to the military’s attempt to constitutionally enshrine its role in politics.
“The issues they were campaigning for, like changing the constitution or amending the lese majeste law, are aligned with party policies,” he said.
Mr Rangsiman did not say how many of the party’s candidates came from the youth movement but Ms Kanokrat said the party had at least 20 candidates, and more behind the scenes, linked to it.
“We have at least three pro-democracy parties in which youth activists have found various roles,” she said.
Political analyst Prajak Kongkirati of Thammasat University said the involvement of the young activists had brought the biggest change to mainstream politics in decades.
They had energised the progressive left while at the same time triggering the rise of a right-wing royalist party, Thai Pakdee, which is campaigning on toughening Section 112, he said.
“The political spectrum has not been this broad in 30 years,” Mr Prajak said. “We have a real progressive left that connects with street politics and a far-right party that rises as a response.”
Another activist-turned-candidate is Piyarat “Toto” Chongthep, 32. He said he was running because he realised he could not make an impact through protests.
“The most we could do was to symbolically express our discontent,” he said. “We need help from the people to democratically give us power to make changes.”
The progressive parties are not expected to win on May 14 but Ms Chonthicha said she was hopeful the presence of young people in politics would at least usher in a more fair system, in which old power-brokers know they cannot just ignore the result of a vote they don’t like.
“I don’t think it’ll be as easy as before because if the people take to the streets again, it will go much further than it did in 2020,” she said.
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