Ken | Mathis Lohatepanont

As the dust settles on the 2023 general election, minds have turned towards the task of building a coalition. 

Before the election, Dr. Napon Jatusripitak and I had outlined three possible scenarios: 1) the status quo, where the conservative coalition assembled by Prayut in 2019 continues to rule, 2) an opposition landslide, where anti-regime parties sweep parliament and form their own government, and 3) a political crossover, where strange bedfellows like Pheu Thai and Palang Pracharath join forces to form a government. 

It is now clear that an opposition victory has occurred, except in a way that few analysts (or even the most optimistic Move Forward supporters) would have predicted: the largest party in parliament will be Move Forward, followed closely by Pheu Thai. Yet the path towards turning that seats into a Move Forward-led government with Pita Limjaroenrat as prime minister is far from straightforward. In particular, given that he is still many votes away from winning any parliamentary vote, what could happen should a parliamentary deadlock ensue is worth considering. 

Click here for the full piece at Thai Enquirer.

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1. Move Forward wins big

The Move Forward Party has over-performed expectations to win this election. At the time of writing, the Move Forward Party is expected to win both the popular vote and the largest number of seats in parliament. By convention, it now has the right to attempt to form a government; the party’s leader, Pita Limjaroenrat, has said he will now begin assembling a coalition.

Few expected that Move Forward would be able to overtake Pheu Thai. Former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s parties in its various incarnations, from Thai Rak Thai to Pheu Thai, have won the largest number of seats in every single general election since 2001. For months, Pheu Thai had been predicting it would win a landslide victory. Now, it finds itself in the unfamiliar position of being the second-largest party in parliament.

How did this happen? Demographics certainly played a role, with a newer generation of voters swinging towards Move Forward. The party’s progressive positions on major policies, along with its strong party brand, solidified the support Future Forward received in 2019. At the same time, the time it took for Pheu Thai to clarify its ambiguous stance on a potential partnership with former government parties may have played a role in driving its supporters towards the straightforward Move Forward Party. 

Click here to read the full piece at Thai Enquirer.

(Cover image credits: MFP)

In an office in northern Thailand, I sat down with an MP from one of the ruling coalition parties. He was confident of victory in his own constituency, but seemed despondent about the state of affairs in the rest of the country. In particular, it rankled him that the Move Forward Party was gaining popularity. They won’t win this time, he said. “But if they remain in opposition, at the next election, they’re going to be scary.” 

It wasn’t an unfounded take. “We’ll still vote for our local MP on the constituency ballot,” a younger voter in a neighboring constituency told me in a coffee shop. Left wide open was the party list.

That Pita Limjaroenrat gets the biggest cheers of anyone when he walks onto a debate stage in the middle of Bangkok is not surprising. But it is a sign of the winds of change and the strength of ideology that even in small towns, where the traditional patterns of patronage politics have dominated, a party that barely bothers to nurture its local networks is gaining support.

Seemingly everywhere in the province, people talked about how Move Forward was running strong. Many were ready to move on, I was constantly told, after eight years of the Prayut administration: they were unhappy about the government’s inability to solve people’s problems and the leader’s own mercurial tendencies. It was sheer Prayut fatigue, buer loong, “tired of the uncle.” “Vote for Move Forward,” the slogan goes, “and Thailand will change.” For a country hungry for change, clearly voters were finding this proposition compelling.

The surge in support for Move Forward indicates that this election is a referendum, not just on Prayut and his government, but on the entire status quo. It is a choice between competing visions of the country. 

Click here for the full piece at Thai Enquirer.

On a campaign truck, the former Future Forward Party leader Thanathorn Juangroongrueangkit was making a speech supporting a Move Forward candidate. “The opportunity for change has come,” he said. “Please give a chance for Pheu Thai to change Thailand…” He was quickly reminded by his team that he was campaigning for the wrong party. On another day, while at a debate, Thanathorn said, “I’ve given interviews before about Pheu Thai…” He then stopped himself and facepalmed. 

These are interesting Freudian slips to make just three weeks away from the election. Pheu Thai has clearly been on Thanathorn’s mind a lot recently. With the next general election in just three weeks, many minds are undoubtedly pondering: is May 14th going to produce a Pheu Thai government? 

On the surface, this shouldn’t be a difficult question to answer. No poll has given any party but Pheu Thai a lead, and it is virtually inconceivable that any other party will win the largest number of seats. Thai Rath is predicting that Pheu Thai will win 247 seats, just three short of an outright majority in the lower house. The Nation’s reporting team believes Pheu Thai is leading in 194 constituencies and is competitive in 84 more; combined with seats from the party-list, that could also take the party close to a majority. NIDA’s latest poll shows that Pheu Thai is over twenty percentage points ahead of any other party.

What, then, could possibly prevent a Pheu Thai ‘landslide,’ a phrase the party repeats incessantly, almost as if they can hypnotize the population into willing it into existence? Here, I’ve listed three key questions that have to be answered to gauge Pheu Thai’s chances of success.

Click here for the full piece at Thai Enquirer.

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The Pheu Thai Party recently announced that it would give every Thai above the age of 16 around 10,000 baht in digital currency, should it win the next election. The money would be provided to a digital wallet and was to be spent within six months in shops within a radius of six kilometers.

The proposal, unsurprisingly, sparked furor. It was attacked for its lack of clarity: what, exactly, is the digital money that Pheu Thai wanted to create? Is Pheu Thai usurping the authority of the Bank of Thailand? Is giving everyone 10,000 baht, all at once, not going to super-charge inflation? And does the Thai government even have the capacity to do this without further borrowing, worsening public debt and simply showing a tremendous lack of fiscal discipline?

These are worthy questions, and even the party itself has struggled to answer them, with their responses sometimes shifting day by day. But let’s be clear: in having this conversation, all the parties are fighting on terrain that Pheu Thai chose.

Click here for the full piece at Thai Enquirer.

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I compiled a 2023 general election voter guide for the Thai Enquirer. This guide includes information about how this election works and the political landscape, and provides a whirlwind tour of each party’s candidates and policy platforms.

I hope that this can be a comprehensive source of information for anyone interested in Thailand’s general election. I’ve often heard that the many actors of Thai politics makes it difficult to understand, and hopefully this guide will help with getting to know where they stand.

Click here for the voter guide.

(Cover image credits: Prachathai)

I cowrote a piece with Dr. Napon Jatusripitak for the ISEAS-Yusof Isak Institute’s Fulcrum website.

Only one party, Pheu Thai, has a credible chance of gaining a majority in the 500-member House but among the major parties, it is least likely to lead in forming a viable governing coalition. In a landscape where the unelected 250-member Senate, which voted en masse for General Prayut in 2019, will join 500 MPs in selecting a new PM, even a Pheu Thai majority would not guarantee that it can assemble a working coalition. This is mainly because the Senate is unlikely to support a PM candidate running under Pheu Thai’s banner.

To secure at least 376 out of 750 votes in parliament, politicians across the political spectrum must form makeshift alliances, setting aside policy priorities and ideological differences in marriages of convenience. This trend is already foreshadowed by large-scale party hopping and the blurring of ideological divisions among major Thai parties.

Thailand’s future public policy trajectory will therefore depend heavily on the characteristics of the post-electoral coalition government, whose composition will likely be subject to the whims of political dealmakers. While Thai voters can influence the parties’ relative electoral performance, voters’ preferences may not be reflected in the post-election coalition configurations.

Click here to read the full piece at Fulcrum.

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Once, I visited one of Bangkok’s skills training academies. These schools, run by either district administrations or the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, offer vocational education for Bangkok residents, allowing them to learn new career-relevant skills. I peeked inside a classroom, and saw a whiteboard filled with numbers.

Was it some sort of mathematics class? You could call it that, but it comes with a special bent. They were numbers, yes, but used for a rather different flavor of calculations than we would think of. It was an astrology class, teaching students the art of fortune-telling. 

Perhaps it’s too easy to laugh at the notion of skills training schools equipping Bangkokians for the future by teaching them astrology. So much, after all, for Thailand 4.0. But it also gets at the heart of a core issue that Thailand faces at this general election: should we focus on quick fixes to raising living standards, or on sustainable solutions to increasing the competitiveness of our workforce? 

Click here to read the full piece at Thai Enquirer.

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This year, Thailand will hold its second general election since the 2014 military coup. Like in 2019, this election will also be held under the auspices of the 2017 Constitution, which allows the unelected Senate and the elected House of Representatives to jointly appoint a prime minister. Unlike in 2019, however, Thailand’s switch to a new majoritarian electoral system in 2022 will favour larger parties. Therefore, the stage is set for a clash between the larger conservative parties that can amass the Senate’s support, and the opposition parties that hope to make sufficient electoral gains to prevent the Senate from being involved in selecting the next prime minister.

For Thailand’s voters, this election will be marked by three key issues: first, the blurring of ideological lines (which had also been an issue that was markedly clear during the 2019 election); second, economic issues that continue to linger as the country recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic; and third, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha’s play for another term after already being in power for eight years.

Click here to read the full piece at 9DashLine.

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