Establishment Wins, People Lose in Thai Political Compromise

By Kheetanat Synth Wannaboworn and Walden Bello*

After months of Thailand being put on hold as the country’s political adversaries tried to figure a way out of the surprising results of the May elections, a solution was finally reached among contending parties on the third week of August.  It was a victory for the establishment, a modus vivendi among its different factions.

The Deal

The elements of the deal were: Thaksin Shinawatra, the self-exiled former Prime Minister, would return to Thailand with a promise of lax treatment for his alleged crimes; The Pheu Thai Party, Thaksin’s personal political vehicle, would lead a governing coalition that would include two defeated parties associated with the powerful military; and a freezing out of the Move Forward Party that had won the most seats in the May parliamentary elections.

The deal that united Thaksin with his former enemies, the military and the Royal Palace, drew anger, consternation, and confusion throughout the country.  Former Foreign Minister  Kasit Piromya, a Thaksin foe who has become a severe critic of the military and the lese majeste law on penalizing people accused of defaming the royalty, summed the situation up thus: “The reality is that this government is composed of personalities from the conservative establishment side.  Arch-enemies, Thaksin and the generals are now together as one to put up a stand (maybe the last one) against the forces of change.  We must be reminded that Thaksin has all along been part of the establishment.  But he wanted to monopolize and was opposed by the rest.  Now various elements of the establishment have rejoined one another.  The Thai political arena is now a struggle between the established elites and the masses.  More dramas will surely come to delight and bewilder all of us.”

On the other hand, spokespeople for the Pheu Thai party said, the deal, which would make real estate mogul Srettha Thavisin prime minister, was necessary to end nearly three months of political uncertainty owing to the absence of a ruling parliamentary coalition.

The Promise

The country’s latest crisis erupted when the MFP unexpectedly won the most votes in the parliamentary elections of May 14, 2023.  It won 151 seats, besting its coalition partner, the Pheu Thai party, that raked in 141 seats.  Left in the dust were the parties controlled by the ruling military regime that gathered a measly 76 seats.

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 percent of votes cast, up from 13 per cent in 2019.  It frustrated every legal maneuver 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 Limjaroenrat, who declared that “Move Forward is the new chapter of Future Forward.”

Wheeling and Dealing

To be Prime Minister, Pita had to get 376 votes from the 750 members of the bicameral National Assembly.  He already had the votes of the the eight-party opposition coalition but, going into the July 13, he needed to secure more, and this had to come either from the rest of the lower house or from the Senate, or both.  Parliament concluded a two-hour voting session with Pita securing 324 votes in his favor, 182 votes against and 199 abstentions in the first round, falling short of the 375 votes needed to become premier by 51 votes.

Other rival parties, such as the formerly influential Democrats that suffered a stunning collapse to only 25 seats, had refused to come to the aid of what they saw as an upstart party.  Another party, the Bhumjaithai Party, which fancied itself as a “kingmaker,” refused to support Pita as it was convinced MFP wanted to overthrow the monarchy owing to its proposal to amend Article 112 of the Constitution, the notorious lese majeste or royal defamation law.

But the most decisive force that shaped the outcome of July 13 were the senators–all of whom were appointed by the military, who considered themselves the “guardians of the Kingdom’s three pillars” – Nation, Religion, and the King.  Pita hardly picked up any votes from this solid reactionary bloc.

The Parliament reconvened on July 19, but Pita’s opponents refused to have a second renomination on the grounds that he had already been rejected a week earlier.  As the debate ensued, the Constitutional Court separately announced Pita had been suspended as a lawmaker over an allegation he violated election rules by holding shares in a private firm.  This was the same flimsy legal basis on which the Constitutional Court disqualified Future Forward founder Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, after the 2019 elections.  At this point, it became very clear that the powerful establishment was not willing to have Move Forward lead a coalition.  Pheu Thai at that point led the process of establishing a new government and, during a month long period of intense negotiations, junked Move Forward and moved to an accommodation with other parties, including the two defeated parties connected with the generals that had ruled the country for nine miserable years.

Thaksin’s return to Thailand to face lenient treatment was apparently the deal that opened the way to a governing alliance among former foes.  Hours after his return on August 20, Parliament elected his man Srettha, with 482 votes from the 727 politicians, as prime minister.  The only significant party to vote against Srettha in the parliament election was Move Forward and its 149 MPs.  The Royal Palace promptly signed off on the results.

Srettha is now leading a fragile coalition of 11 parties.  In the Srettha Administration which officially started on September 2, 2023,  Pheu Thai secured eight cabinet posts and nine deputy cabinet posts. The parties of the military – Palang Pracharath and United Thai Nation – received two cabinet posts and two deputy posts each.  Pheu Thai further revealed that the coalition had agreed to “support” Pheu Thai’s platform of boosting the economy, increasing the minimum wage, ending mandatory conscription, the continued legalization of medical marijuana, and amending the constitution to make the country “become more democratic,” while not touching the royal defamation law.

The Meaning of the May Elections

“Left: Electoral District’s Voting Results, Right: Party List’s Voting Results. Please click the image to visit the interactive map and explore the voting results at https://election66.thaipbs.or.th/result/geo

The deal has largely unsettled and angered most of the electorate, which saw the May election’s results as a clear mandate for fundamental change.  Observers have underlined the following points:

–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 in the last few years, created the context for the emergence of an electoral party whose average age of parliamentarians is 37.

–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.

–MFP’s outstripping of its coalition partner Pheu Thai as the country’s leading party, along with the extremely poor performance of the Pheu Thai’s bete noir, 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 mobilized 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 of 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.”

Prospects for the New Reigning Coalition

Will the “Back from the Future Coalition” be able to defuse the smoldering anger that is the response to its formation?

Some observers are of the opinion that this time, the establishment has overreached and, while people are not yet out in the streets in protest, they will come out eventually, leading to another round of intense street battles, like the ones that led to the military coup in 2014.

Others do not see the governing coalition lasting very long, expecting the infighting among former bitter enemies to resume in short order, especially since there is really no agreement on a common program except to form a government.  Behind the scenes the formidable Thaksin and the equally formidable military-backed conservative establishment will be calling the shots, and it’s unlikely they find common ground is they are not to disappoint their constituencies.  The mass base of Thaksin, the so-called Redshirts, are expecting his populist agenda to resume, while the elite is determined to make no concessions on the social and economic front.

Coming out of the deal, Thaksin and Pheu Thai are likely to be the big losers, being seen by a significant bloc of former supporters as having betrayed the popular mandate in order to promote the interests of the party and the Thaksin family.  Thaksin is seen by many former sympathizers as a has-been.  Move Forward has captured their political imagination, the way Thaksin did two decades ago.

Move Forward, ironically, is the one force that has come of the whole messy affair untarnished.  It never gave up on its promise to reform the lese majeste law.  It escaped the wheeling and dealing that it would have had to engage in to gain enough support from the forces of the old order to form a new ruling coalition.  It will now be able to engage in uncompromising opposition politics, with the likely support of the majority of the citizenry.

An indication of what lies ahead is the #CONFORALL signature campaign.  Determined to have a new constitution that truly reflects the will of the citizens, the People’s Constitution Drafting Group–a network of CSOs and activist groups—is calling for a referendum on having a new charter drafted by a 100-percent elected committee.  Three days ahead of the deadline set by the Election Commission for it to receive the people’s petition before the first Cabinet meeting in early September, organizers were told by the Commission that most of the 113,912 names that had been collected so far from offline and online gatherings were invalid since only signatures on paper documents would be recognized.  In the next three days, 205,739 signatures on paper stormed into the campaign’s head office – four times larger than the 50,000 threshold required by law.  One elated observer said this reminded her of the time the slogan “You messed with the Wrong Generation!” became the battle cry of the 2020 youth uprising.  “The battle lines are being drawn,” she said.

*Kheetanat Synth Wannaboworn and Walden Bello are members of the staff of the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South.