Global Courant 2023-05-15 01:50:13
Voters in Thailand overwhelmingly sought to end nearly a decade of military rule on Sunday by voting in favor of two opposition parties that have pledged to curtail the power of the country’s powerful conservative institutions: the military and the monarchy.
With 97 percent of the vote counted early Monday morning, the progressive Move Forward Party was neck and neck with the populist Pheu Thai Party. Move Forward had won 151 seats against Pheu Thai’s 141 in the 500-seat House of Representatives.
In most parliamentary systems, the two parties would form a new governing coalition and elect a prime minister. But under the rules of the current Thai system, written by the military after the 2014 coup, the junta will still play kingmaker.
The election was widely seen as an easy victory for Pheu Thai, the country’s largest opposition party founded by former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. A billionaire magnate, Mr Thaksin, 73, was ousted in a 2006 coup over corruption allegations, but he is still fondly remembered as a populist champion for the rural poor. Polls had shown that Mr Thaksin’s youngest daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, 36, was the top choice for prime minister.
But to a surprise, the Move Forward Party, a progressive political party calling for the toppling of old power structures and amending a law criminalizing public criticism of the monarchy, made stunning strides in capturing young urban voters and the capital, Bangkok.
“We can view this election as a referendum on traditional centers of power in Thai politics,” said Napon Jatusripitak, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. “People want change, not just a change of government, they want structural reform.”
The main question many Thais now have is whether the military establishment, which has long held an iron grip on Thai politics, will accept the result.
Move Forward has focused on institutions and policies that were once considered sacred in Thai society, including compulsory military service and the laws protecting the king from criticism. And with the Pheu Thai Party in government, the party’s founder and one of the military’s biggest rivals, Mr Thaksin, could once again be at the center of the country’s politics.
The results were a humiliating blow to Prime Minister Prayuth Chan o-cha, the general who ruled Thailand for nearly nine years, the longest period of military rule in a country accustomed to coups.
Mr Prayuth has managed a lagging economy and in 2020 waged a crackdown on protesters who gathered on the streets of Bangkok to call for democratic reform. While Thailand is one of the US’s two formal allies in Southeast Asia, it distanced itself from Washington and leaned closer to Beijing.
As of Monday morning, it was still unclear who would ultimately lead the country. The junta rewrote the country’s constitution in 2017 so that the selection of the prime minister would come down to a joint vote between the 250-member army-appointed Senate and the popularly elected House of Representatives. The decision can take weeks or months.
Since both Pheu Thai and Move Forward do not have enough seats to form a majority, they will have to negotiate with each other and with other parties to form a coalition.
Analysts said Move Forward’s stance on amending the royal protection bill could complicate negotiations to form a coalition. Before the vote, Move Forward attempted to moderate its stance on the measure and tone down its call for reform.
But on Sunday, Move Forward leader Pita Limjaroenrat made it clear that the amendment was still high on his party’s agenda, saying they now have enough MPs to push it forward.
“So it’s not conditional, it’s already absolute that we go through with it,” he said.
Pita, 42, a former businessman, was appointed leader of Move Forward after the country’s Constitutional Court in 2020 dissolved the party’s previous iteration, the Future Forward Party, and suspended the party’s senior executives for 10 years. banned from politics. Mr. Pita, a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a charismatic speaker who called on voters to create “a new history in Thai politics”.
His background as a technocrat is in stark contrast to Pheu Thai’s leading contender, who has sought to promote Ms. Paetongtarn, Mr. Thaksin’s youngest daughter.
Ms. Paetongtarn, an executive in her family’s hotel management company with little political experience, was selected after her father said that people “wanted to see a representative of the Shinawatra family as a force in the party.”
She proved to be an effective campaigner, even in the last weeks of her pregnancy. (She gave birth on May 1 and quickly returned to the campaign trail.)
The strong showing for Move Forward was remarkable for a party deemed too radical for the general population. Move Forward ran on a platform that legalized gay marriage and a minimum wage of $13 a day, among other things.
The election was cast as an existential struggle for the country’s future. Both Pheu Thai and Move Forward campaigned for pledges to put Thailand back on the path of electoral democracy, calling on people to reject the “uncles” or the “Three Ps”, referring to the generals who have led Thailand since the coup have managed: Mr. Prayuth, Deputy Prime Minister General Prawit “Pom” Wongsuwan and Interior Minister General Anupong “Pok” Paochinda.
Move Forward was even more emphatic in saying it would never work with military-backed parties, a position that attracted more voters to the party. Several young people who had joined the 2020 protests campaigned as the first Move Forward candidates in the election.
The vote underlined just how politically fragmented the nation of 72 million is today. It is no longer divided between the “red shirt” pro-Thaksin protesters from the rural north and the “yellow shirt” anti-Thaksin faction made up of royalists and the urban elite. Now it is divided along generational lines.
On Sunday, millions of Thais lined up about 100 degrees in the heat to cast their votes.
“I really hope for change,” said Saisunee Chawasirikunthon, 48, an employee at a telecommunications company. “We’ve been living with the same old thing for the past eight years.”
At his last rally on Friday, former General Prayuth urged voters to opt for continuity by playing a video that showed graffiti on Bangkok’s Democracy Monument and a young girl uploading a pornographic clip of herself because she “wanted freedom ‘ had.
“We don’t need a change that will turn the country upside down,” he said.
Over the past century, Thailand has oscillated between civilian democracy and military control, with the armed forces carrying out a dozen coups in that period. On Thursday, Narongpan Jitkaewthae, Thailand’s army chief, went to great lengths to assure the public that this time would be different.
He said the country had learned its lessons from its past and that “politics in a democratic system must continue”, although he added that he “cannot guarantee” that another coup will not take place.
