🇹🇭 Thailand election update

Paetongtarn Shinawatra's time in the sun — but it's not over yet

April 11, 2023

Hello friends!

A lot of Thailand election reads this week. It’s a lot, but holy heck there’s been some great work done by Thai and foreign journalists and thinkers lately. We’re just over a month out now from the May 14 vote, so expect weekly updates from Dari Mulut ke Mulut in your inbox between now and then. 

Today, I have indulged my Paetongtarn Shinawatra interest. Next week, I’m looking forward to bringing you a look at how the pro-democracy movement fits in with the election. 

These election newsletters are free for all readers, but please consider a premium subscription if you get some value out of this work. As always Asean and Timorese nationals under 30 are welcome to a free membership, just hit that reply and let me know about yourself.

Thanks,Erin Cook

Who’s who a month out

A handy one here from Channel News Asia that breaks down each party’s major policy announcements. VICE had a great one in March, too. 

Will this be the last cycle that features the Democrats? That’s the question Nikkei Asia is asking. The party took a battering in 2019 and many remaining MPs eventually jumped ship. Would-be Democrat backers have ditched the party in droves since the 2008 dissolution of Thaksin Shinawatra’s then-party after which a “coalition led by Democrat leader Abhisit Vejjajiva” seized power. It’s been a winner for Future Forward/Move Forward. 

“The faction of democracy advocates within the Democrat Party transferred their votes to Future Forward Party. Some people refer to Move Forward as the ‘the Democrat Party’s Second Phase,’” Siripan Nogsuan Sawasdee, an associate professor at Chulalongkorn University told Nikkei Asia. Great line.

Is it Anutin’s time to shine?

I don’t exactly think so, but this piece from Time convinced me not to rule it out. “If one factor could shift the whole political equilibrium in Thailand, I think it would be Anutin,” Pavin Chachavalpongpun, an associate professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University in Japan, told the magazine. This profile begins with a generous retelling of the policy that Anutin, as health minister, is probably most renowned for internationally — the enormous 180-degree shift on cannabis. This is an excellent profile and touches on his time in the ministry as well as the broader odds for his Bhumjaithai Party. 

There is a war coming

Or maybe not, that’s electoral politics, baby! Pheu Thai and Move Forward are scrapping it out over the same voter base, according to this report from Thai PBS. Which, on the one hand, isn’t ideal if the ultimate goal is to oust a military-aligned government. But on the other hand uhhh that’s how elections work. 

“Pheu Thai thinks Move Forward is luring away its previously loyal supporters. After all, these two parties share the same stance – standing in opposition to General Prayut Chan-o-cha,” Olarn Thinbangtieo from Burapha University’s Faculty of Political Science and Law, told the outlet.

Pheu Thai is still polling higher than Move Forward but as election day creeps closer, the stakes are getting higher and the debate is becoming ugly. “When Thai politicians attack one another, they make scathing comments and rally supporters against their targets. We are now seeing such behaviour on the stage as well as on social media,” Olarn said. 

Dance cards are full, what are the moves?

If this feels a bit light on the policy, that might be beside the point. ISEAS researcher Napon Jatusripitak and political scientist Ken Mathis Lohatepanont write in a commentary piece that policies won’t decide the eventual outcome — it’ll be backroom wheeling and dealing. In Australia, this is depicted as lawmakers flouting anti-smoking laws in quiet Chinese restaurants, what’s the Thai equivalent?

Pheu Thai is the only party with a “credible” choice in winning a majority, but is, of course, “least likely to lead in forming a viable governing coalition.” The pair predict three scenarios as the most likely outcomes. The “status quo” that will see a new government formed out of an “amalgamation” of currently governing (and aligned) parties, an “opposition landslide” in which we get some real drama and the current government is dumped fully or “a political crossover” in which “where key parties from the current government and opposition team up to form a new “national reconciliation” government,” as they put it. 

Well! Those are some heady options. Click on through to see what Napon and Ken think these scenarios look like in practice. 

Get your Paetongtarn takes here! 

In our first Thailand election blast, I suggested we’d shortly see an influx of Paetongtarn Shinawatra profile pieces and, good Lord, have the regional correspondents and Bangkok desks delivered! The onslaught comes after Pheu Thai officially names the chosen daughter as PM candidate. I think I’m addicted to these stories and each and every one is worth your time.  

At the Bangkok rally, Paetongtarn asked supporters to help deliver the party a landslide win to counter any potential move by the Senate to deny its candidates. Previous Thaksin-linked parties have won the most seats in every election since 2001, only to be unseated from government by the army or the courts. 

While Paetongtarn’s aunt Yingluck Shinawatra was ousted in the coup led by Prayuth, her father Thaksin’s government was toppled in a coup in 2006. He has lived in self-exile overseas for nearly 15 years.

“You probably remember how our power was stolen by the coup,” Paetongtarn said to the crowd. The coup had hurt everyone, she said. “None of us want it any more, right? None of us want any more coups, right?”

However, despite Thaksin’s physical absence, many see him as continuing to influence the Pheu Thai party – firstly through his sister, Yingluck, who became the country’s first female prime minister in 2011, and now through Paetongtarn – a mother of one who is expecting her second child, a boy, at around the same time as the election is due.

Thaksin has endorsed his daughter’s political skills and said that she would make a good prime minister, but has played down suggestions that he still pulls the strings.

“I have seen her dedicate herself to the party… and she has done a good job even though she is pregnant,” he said of his daughter in March.

A recent national poll showed that 38 per cent of people surveyed wanted the political rookie to be the country's next leader.

That's more than twice the number of respondents who supported incumbent prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha, who launched a military coup against Paetongtarn's aunt in 2014. 

Paetongtarn has a large social media following, too, with young people not only liking her campaign trail pictures but also lapping up the glimpses into her glamorous life as an heiress to a billionaire's fortune.

But experts warn obstacles are ahead for a Shinawatra family that is despised by many among the conservative elite who see Paetongtarn as a puppet for Thaksin.

In addition to military takeovers, that elite has frequently drawn on the support of the constitutional court to take out its rivals when polls turn unfavourable.

“I think the possibility of a party dissolution, before or after the election, to give advantage to a pro-military coalition cannot be ruled out,” said Napon Jatusripitak, a political scientist and researcher at The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Yusof-Ishak Institute in Singapore.

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