What happens in Thai politics this year will be determined by the upcoming election on Feb. 8. While contesting political parties are in full campaign mode, the history of Thai polls so far in the 21st century is not encouraging. Only once in the past 25 years have voting results gone in accordance with the popular will. Whether the vote in four weeks will follow the same pattern will depend on whether the conservative establishment gets its preferred outcome.
That preferred outcome is the post-election continuation of the incumbent government under Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul and his Bhumjaithai Party. The datapoints for this claim lie in the other two major competing banners, Pheu Thai and the People’s Party. Since 2005, Pheu Thai has been dissolved twice under previous names by the Constitutional Court and deposed twice by military coups, its sitting prime ministers having been removed multiple times in the same period, including founding patriarch Thaksin Shinawatra, who is currently in jail, his sister Yingluck Shinawatra, and his daughter Paetongtarn Shinawatra.
The People’s Party was similarly disbanded twice, in 2020 and 2024, its core leaders struck down with long-term bans from running for office, including a lifelong prohibition for Pannika Wanich. Currently, 44 members of the People’s Party face long or even lifetime bans. There is no reason why the powerful political forces behind this pattern of subversion and manipulation would now tolerate a government led by the People’s Party.
If you want to understand what is going to happen in the Feb. 8 poll, you would do well to look at past elections. It is difficult to see the forest of Thai politics because there are countless trees swaying back and forth and sideways that blur and mislead the eye. Attention-seeking social media make matters worse. Everybody is fixated on the here and now, maybe yesterday and tomorrow, because that is how social media technologies and big-tech commercialism have wired our minds.
But a simple internet search of Thai elections in 2001, 2005, 2007, 2011, 2019, and 2023 will show that only two of the governments emerging from them ran their course and completed their full terms. The first was the juggernaut Thai Rak Thai Party that won 248 of 500 seats in January 2001. Its ingenious populist policy platform and redistributive aims opened up the Thai political system by systematically empowering, and connecting with, poor people like no other parties had done before. For the policy innovations that broke up the structure of patronage centered on traditional state institutions, Thai Rak Thai won an unprecedented landslide re-election in February 2005, garnering 376 of 500 seats, just a tad short of 19 million popular votes. This led a record-setting one-party government without any coalition partner.
Thai Rak Thai’s and Thaksin’s massive personal popularity then became a threat to the establishment and they were duly overthrown by the coup in September 2006. Thailand has been in a tailspin since, its economy sputtering for the next two decades, unable to find a new footing. Although a new constitution was drafted to weaken and dilute the Thai Rak Thai phenomenon, including its dissolution, its successor People’s Power Party (Palang Prachachon) still won the December 2007 poll just short of an overall majority. That government then faced protests and the party was hammered with another dissolution in December 2008, paving the way for the opposition Democrat Party to cobble together a military-sponsored coalition government. While it governed until completion of its parliamentary term, the Democrat Party lost to the People’s Power Party to begin with.
Then came Yingluck’s leadership of Pheu Thai, which won an outright victory in the July 2011 poll with 265 of 500 seats. Eventually she also faced Bangkok-centered street demonstrations that laid the groundwork for the military coup in May 2014. As martial law was imposed, critics and opponents of the coup, including many politicians and activists, were rounded up, detained and deprived of basic freedoms. Led by General Prayut Chan-o-cha, the coup regime came up with another constitution in 2017, embedded with a five-year clause to allow military-appointed senators to choose the prime minister in parliament and a tricksy mixed-member apportionment system which gave latitude and discretion to the Election Commission.
This is where Thai politics is today. In the March 2019 poll, Prayut led the conservative Palang Pracharath Party, but it lost to Pheu Thai 116 : 136. Yet thanks to the Election Commission’s interpretation of vote distribution from mixed-member apportionments, a bunch of parties ended up with one MP each. Under the watch of a military government at the time, Palang Pracharath was able to put together a coalition government with Prayut continuing at the helm, completing a full term until the election in May 2023.
For the conservative establishment, Anutin is the new Prayut. The upcoming vote will likely be free and fair, but it is possible that results will be tweaked afterwards. If Bhumjaithai wins an overall majority, then it will lead the next coalition without controversy. But if it does not, controversies will probably ensue, much like the way the Move Forward Party was thwarted after winning the last poll and Pheu Thai’s two prime ministers were eliminated before the premier’s role went to Anutin, whose medium-sized party came third in the previous election.
Unlike the campaign period leading up to the May 2023 poll, when there was a lot of noise about how to derail and upend Move Forward, the various supervisory agencies remain silent in the face of outstanding charges against Bhumjaithai for land encroachment and alleged collusion in the rigging of the senate election in 2024.
Anutin has so far refused to engage in televised debates with other party leaders, biding his time until polling day as he seems assured that the stars will align around his continuation. This is how Thailand’s current political system is set up.
Thitinan Pongsudhirak is a senior fellow at the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University. This article first appeared in the Bangkok Post.
