Thai politics appears to be in a loop, with the military keeping people’s democratic hopes under wraps. But there is reason to believe the streets won’t be quiet for long.
By Wichuta Teeratanabodee and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
November 2024
In Thailand’s 2023 parliamentary elections, voters sent a clear message to the military and monarchy: The people wanted change. The progressive Move Forward Party (MFP) won a plurality of the vote for the 500-seat House of Representatives, and its 42-year-old leader, Pita Limjaroenrat, appeared to have a good shot at forming a government and becoming the next prime minister.
Pita was optimistic about his prospects. So when Taylor Swift, who had canceled her 2014 Bangkok show after a military takeover that May, announced in July 2023 that she was adding new stops to her “Eras Tour,” he tweeted to the star: “Hey, Taylor! Big fan of yours. Thailand is back on track to be fully democratic after you had to cancel last time due to the coup. The Thai people have spoken via the election” — the junta’s party had, after all, been beaten by not just the MFP but also the Pheu Thai Party of deposed former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra — “and we all look forward to welcoming you to this beautiful nation of ours!”
Flash forward to today: Pita is not prime minister; he is at Harvard spending a year as a “democracy fellow.” There is no “fully democratic” Thailand. And Thai Swifties have yet to see their idol in person, performing hits such as 2020’s “Only the Young,” perhaps a badly needed reminder that time is on the side of change.
In August 2024, the Constitutional Court dissolved the MFP for proposing to amend the lèse-majesté law (criminalizing criticism of the monarchy) and banned Pita and other key party figures from politics for ten years. Two weeks later, the Court removed sitting prime minister Srettha Thavisin of the second-place winner and military rival-turned-ally Pheu Thai, which had formed a coalition government in 2023 after Pita was blocked by the Senate. Replacing Srettha is Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the 37-year-old daughter of Thaksin and niece of Yingluck Shinawatra, also a deposed prime minister.
In another country, this saga might have been shocking. For Thais, it was business as usual.
The 2019 parliamentary elections had also featured an upstart progressive party. It was called the Future Forward Party (FFP) and it came in third at the polls — an impressive finish for a party that had been founded only the year before, but not good enough to form a government. When the votes were counted, General Prayuth Chan-ocha, the junta leader who had been ruling as prime minister since the 2014 coup, and his Palang Pracharath Party had won enough votes to hold onto power.
Still, the FFP’s strong performance shook Prayuth and the entire Thai political establishment. Almost a year after the election, the Constitutional Court, ruling that the FFP had accepted funds from an illegitimate source, mandated the party’s dissolution, and exiled its charismatic leader, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, from political life for ten years. This sparked outrage among Thais. Protests broke out on several university campuses and soon bled into the streets, eventually becoming a mass movement dominated largely by young people, including even high-school and middle-school students.
The demonstrations continued into 2021. Over time, the movement coalesced around three core demands: Prayuth’s resignation, a new constitution, and reform of the monarchy and the country’s harsh lèse-majesté law.
“Let It End with Our Generation”
“Let it end with our generation!” was a slogan often heard at rallies in 2020 and 2021. What exactly did the protesters mean by this?
Time reporter Koh Ewe recently wrote, “History has a habit of repeating itself — but rarely as frequently as it does in Thailand.” The repeat in 2023 of 2019’s strong electoral showing and subsequent dissolution of an establishment-threatening youthful party is far from the only recurrence. Topping the list must surely be the country’s seemingly endless string of coups d’état. Since Thailand transitioned from an absolute to constitutional monarchy in 1932, coups have toppled thirteen governments. And there have been a few more attempts that failed. The two most recent overthrows, in 2006 and 2014, were strikingly similar, sending two civilian prime ministers, brother and sister Thaksin and Yingluck Shinawatra, into exile.
In the aftermath of a coup in Thailand, a military man, with support from the monarchy and economic establishment, usually sets up a government with the basic trappings of an ordinary one. Such was the case in 2014. Prayuth assumed the premiership, promising to bring reform and restore unity and happiness in the country. Yet it was three years before a new constitution came into force and two more years before elections were held.
Drafted by the junta, the 2017 Constitution in many ways favored the status quo. It stipulated, for example, that the popularly elected House of Representatives and the military-appointed 250-member Senate together would elect the prime minister, stacking the deck in favor of Prayuth getting a second term in 2019. (This Senate concluded its term in mid-2024. New senators, now only 200 in number, were selected from twenty social and professional groups in a controversial new process.)
And whether under military or civilian rule Thai governments are often in league with military men. That remains the case today, as the Pheu Thai coalition is working with former members of the junta, and Prayuth himself now has a role on the royal Privy Council, which advises the king.
The Thai people have not only seen their chosen leaders overthrown by the military time and again, but they’ve repeatedly seen their political parties disbanded, only to emerge from the ashes in a somewhat different form. Today’s Pheu Thai Party is the recent descendant of Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai Party. The Constitutional Court disbanded Thai Rak Thai in 2007 and its first successor, the People’s Power Party, just three months later. (In fact, one of Pheu Thai’s critics has just petitioned for its dissolution. It’s too early to predict the outcome, though its position today seems less precarious than that of its predecessors.) Following the same pattern, the FFP reconstituted as the MFP after being banned in 2020, and the now-disbanded MFP has reconstituted as the People’s Party (PP).
The PP, in fact, has two bases on which to build. Its contemporary roots, of course, are grounded in the MFP. With its 14 million votes and first-place finish in 2023, the party could legitimately claim to represent “the people” of Thailand, hence the name of its successor.
The PP’s historical roots extend to the 1932 Siamese Revolution, staged by a group that was also known as the People’s Party. Today’s PP hopes to finally complete the democratization project that began more than ninety years ago. The association is powerful. The 2020–21 protesters also portrayed their movement as a new incarnation of the “People’s Party,” adopting slogans and symbols from the revolution. History thus repeats on both sides of Thai politics.
Along with the reruns, however, are a few original new episodes.
After years in exile, Thaksin Shinawatra returned to Thailand in August 2023, around the same time that Srettha was elected prime minister. Before the month was over, his daughter was prime minister and he had received a royal pardon — more of the same, but also something new. Thaksin’s relations with the monarchy had always been contentious, making the pardon a real break from the past. His daughter’s rise to the premiership, however, was nothing new; she is the fourth Shinawatra to hold the post. And many Thais are convinced that Thaksin now has considerable say in how Thailand is run.
History never repeats itself exactly. So while there are strong echoes of 2020 in Thai politics today, not everything is the same. The FFP’s disbandment sparked a protest movement, but so far, we have not seen major protests erupt since the Constitutional Court’s ruling on the MFP and Pita. This seems especially curious if we remember that the FFP only came in third in the 2019 elections. In 2023, the MFP came in first overall, and in Bangkok, where the biggest protests took place in 2020–21, the MFP won all but one seat.
Of course, some of the protest leaders have been jailed or gone into exile. And those activists who do remain in the country and out of prison may be exhausted from fighting court battles related to the protests or disillusioned about the 2023 elections again failing to bring about change despite their outcome.
Thanathorn cited a different reason for the muted response of MFP supporters to its dissolution: Party activists had seen it coming, had planned accordingly, and had been preparing “the people mentally that the horizon is the election 2027,” assuring them that a new party would form.
Breaking the Cycle
Thanathorn seems confident that the third time will be the charm — that the PP will win an outright majority in 2027 and succeed in forming a government. After all, many of the young veterans of the 2020–21 protests were not old enough to vote in 2023, but they will be in 2027. Millennials on their own were not able to end Thailand’s déjà vu politics in the last election. But maybe with gen-z joining them at the polls, next time will finally be different.
Were that to happen, Thai politics might proceed with a mix of repetition and change: New progressive party does impressively well again in 2027, avoids being dissolved and, as winners of a majority or plurality, forms a government.
Or politics might proceed down the same long-trodden path, with the royal-military alliance deploying legal maneuvers yet again to overturn the will of the people. Even worse, there could be another coup. It’s a fool’s game to make predictions in this situation, but we will venture one: If, three years from now, the PP wins by a landslide and is blocked from power by either legal or military moves, the streets will not remain quiet again.
Wichuta Teeratanabodee is a doctoral student in Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University and has published in periodicals such as The Diplomat and New Mandela, as well as being a past contributor to the Journal of Democracy. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom teaches Chinese history at UC Irvine and his publications include two short books for Columbia Global Reports — Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (2020) and The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing (forthcoming in June 2025).
Copyright © 2024 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Peerapon Boonyakiat/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
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