🇹🇭 BREAKING: Thai democracy

Hello friends!

Huge news from Thailand today where Move Forward has been forcibly dissolved by the Constitutional Court. It was virtually a done deal, given the history of the court, but it’s still a tremendous blow to pro-democracy advocates and Move Forward voters country over. 

The movement will surely rise from the ashes, as it did after Future Forward faced a similar fate. But next week it will be Prime Minister Srettha Thaivisin’s future on the edge with his possible dismissal to be heard by the same court next Wednesday. 

Erin Cook

And Move Forward goes down. The Constitutional Court this afternoon has forced the dissolution of the party — which, as we always stress in these pages, won a third of the country in last year’s election — citing policies that would reform the country’s untouchable lese-majeste laws.

The ruling also bans the party's executive members who served from March 2021 to January of this year. This includes Pita Limjaroenrat and current leader Chaithawat Tulathon, Nikkei Asia reports. 

Party leadership had hoped that the written evidence provided to the Court after the Election Commission filed a petition back in March would save it, but the court found in favour of the EC which said it had “reasonable evidence” Move Forward wanted to overthrow the monarchy. Why EC was able to make such claims at the court to begin with has been a key argument for Move Forward.

In the coming days analysis and the response from the political class will begin to come through. At this stage, just about everything I’ve read stresses we should not expect any sort of violence in the immediate response. 

Before we get really into it, there have been some great explainers in the last few days that can catch you up if need be!

Thailand’s Move Forward Party faces potential dissolution as ruling looms (Al Jazeera)

Should the court rule against the MFP, the party could be dissolved and its leaders banned for 10 years, marking a sharp turnaround in its fortunes since its stunning election victory a little more than a year ago.

Thai court to decide fates of PM and opposition party (Reuters)

If the party is disbanded, its surviving 143 lawmakers will keep their seats and are expected to re-organise into another party, as they did in 2020 when its predecessor, Future Forward, was dissolved over a campaign funding violation, which was among the factors behind massive anti-government street protests.

Top Thai Court Set to Decide Fate of Nation’s Most Popular Party (Bloomberg)

The upstart party antagonized Thailand’s pro-royalist conservative establishment that’s held sway over national politics since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932 with its call for reforms. In its January ruling, the charter court ordered the party to cease all its activities related to the campaign to amend the lese majeste law, also known as Article 112 of the Thai penal code.

So what next?

Get ready for “quite a political inferno here in Thailand,” Move Forward’s former leader Pita Limjaroenrat told Bloomberg last week as the clock began to countdown. Pita, who led the party to its stunning election win last year before being barred from taking the prime minister and getting entangled in his own legal troubles, warned democracy in Thailand is already on the ropes and dissolution would be a disaster.

“It’s safe to assume that democracy in Thailand is on the defence,” he said. 

But it’s not like the movement hasn’t been here before. Establishing a new party would “go smoother” than the Future Forward to Move Forward shift, simply because they’ve had to do it before: “If we do that, regardless of what the name would be, the ‘Leap Forward Party’ or whatever name, it doesn’t matter much.” 

Speaking this week to the Associated Press he hopes the party would be the last to go down and change would come. “We’re fighting this not just because of my personal future or my party’s future, but we want to make sure that, if it happens, that Pita becomes the last person. The Move Forward Party becomes the last party that joins the graveyard of political parties,” he said. 

Pannika “Chor” Wanich, a co-founder of Future Forward, told the Nation Wednesday morning that she fully expects Move Forward to become stronger after the ordeal — even if it’s as a different party. “If the MFP escapes dissolution, it will move forward and become formidable, with wings to fly forward unstoppable,” she said. 

Adding to what Pita noted about a new party, she said that between FF and MF it took a month to register a new party. But, Move Forward has probably learnt from that and would be able to rise from the ashes much faster. 

Whatever happens next, few analysts expect to see any sort of large-scale street protests like we’ve seen in Thailand’s recent history. “If the Move Forward Party gets dissolved, maybe [young people] will not immediately jump out to take action or to demonstrate against the ruling, but still in the long term — they are not going to change their minds,” Panuwat Panduprasert, political science professor at Chiang Mai University, told the Guardian.