Joshua Kurlantzick
In Thailand’s elections on March 24, the military’s proxy party, Palang Pracharath, performed better than pre-election surveys had indicated, finishing with 8.4 million votes, the most of any party. Combined with its seats in the unelected upper house, which is stacked with pro-military allies, Palang Pracharath should control enough seats to ensure that Prayuth Chan-ocha, who has led a military junta governing the country since 2014, will become prime minister again. Pheu Thai, the populist party aligned with exiled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, finished second with 7.9 million votes, but won the greatest number of the 350 constituency-based seats in the lower house, with 137 to Palang Pracharath’s 97. Another strongly anti-junta party, Future Forward, also performed well in the constituency-based seats. The remaining 150 of the 500 lower house seats will be allocated later based on a complicated party list process, with the official results scheduled to be finalized May 9.
Pheu Thai and Future Forward, joined by other anti-junta parties, have formed a coalition in the lower house in an effort to block Prayuth, but it seems unlikely they will be able to do so, since their coalition is narrow and weak. Prayuth was helped by a complex electoral system that the junta midwifed under a new constitution, which was designed to undermine large parties and potentially aid a new party like Palang Pracharath. Despite apparent irregularities on Election Day, the veneer of democracy should be enough for most countries to restore full relations. Washington, for instance, probably will end all restrictions on military education and arms sales to Thailand.
Despite the unfair run-up to Election Day and obstacles placed in the way of anti-junta parties, the election also offered some indications of Thailand’s future politics. Older parties declined in power, their votes sapped by newer forces like Palang Pracharath. Instead of the past decade’s division between backers and opponents of the Thaksin-linked Pheu Thai, Thai voters may now be splitting, as Thailand analyst Andrew MacGregor Marshall has noted, between supporters of a new era of military-led guided democracy and strong opponents of continued de facto army rule.
Unfortunately, this election will do little to bridge the gap between those two sides. And it is hard to be optimistic that Prayuth’s government will address Thailand’s other serious problems, like soaring socio-economic inequality, bloated military budgets and declining economic competitiveness.
Since 2001, when Thaksin was first elected prime minister, parties linked to him had dominated every election in Thailand—until this one. To be sure, the military made it very hard for Pheu Thai and other Thaksin-linked parties to succeed, and Thaksin complained after Election Day of fraud.
But the election also suggested that Thaksin’s pull on the electorate may be waning, with Thais growing tired of two decades of battle between pro-Thaksin and anti-Thaksin forces. Other parties, including Palang Pracharath, have copied some of Thaksin’s signature populist policies and promised social welfare payouts, and Pheu Thai may have seemed too much like a Thaksin personality cult for some voters. Several weeks before the election, Thaksin threw a Hail Mary, trying to enlist the king’s older sister, Princess Ubolratana, as a prime minister candidate for Thai Raksa Chart, an allied party. The gambit failed when the king stepped in and blocked the princess from running for office, and Thai Raksa Chart was then dissolved. The bold move, which other Pheu Thai leaders seemed to know little about in advance, might have further entrenched the idea that Thaksin, who as prime minister had little regard for the rule of law, was in total, almost dictatorial control of the party.
Instability in Thailand will continue to prevent the country from regaining its historical role as a regional leader on security and economic issues.
Other traditional warhorses faltered too. The Democrats, Thailand’s oldest political party, were decimated. In the 2011 elections, the Democrats won 159 seats. This time around, the enfeebled party won only 33 constituency-based seats. Just as Thaksin’s populism was co-opted by other parties, the Democrats’ appeal to Bangkok elites—through their support for royalism and, often, the military—was co-opted by the military’s own party, Palang Pracharath. In other words, the Democrats offered no clear reason for voters to choose them.
Instead, other, new parties outperformed expectations, and Thailand’s future divide could be between the army’s party and the coalition of parties—now in a tentative alliance in the lower house—that generally want to restore full democracy, cut the military’s budget and implement real civilian rule over the army.
Future Forward, a party of novices that had never competed in an election before and shunned traditional pork-barrel politics, finished third with some 6 million votes and 30 constituency-based seats in the new parliament, with more party-list seats to come. The excellent result suggests that, especially among younger Thais, it could become the future main voice of opposition to military rule—if, that is, the army does not silence it first. Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, Future Forward’s telegenic billionaire leader, faces a potential ban from politics on flimsy charges that false information was posted on his profile on the party website.
Both Palang Pracharath and Future Forward’s appeal, to some extent, cut across regional divides, and both took voters from other established parties. Palang Pracharath even managed to cut into some of Pheu Thai’s rural base. In Future Forward’s case, the party offered a new platform: a break from patronage politics and a vision of progressive democracy. Regardless of Thanathorn’s fate, these ideas have resonance among many Thais.
For now, however, the election produced no clear winner between popularly-backed autocratic rule and a clear break back toward democracy. But with a new divide in Thai politics emerging, older political leaders fading and the party system imploding, the country’s two decades of political struggle have left major problems that Prayuth and the military are ill-equipped to handle. Backers of Thaksin, though possibly diminished, will remain angry, and instability in Thailand will continue to prevent the country, a U.S. treaty ally, from regaining its historical role as a regional leader on security and economic issues. Already one of the most unequal countries in the world, Thailand reportedly has become the most unequalin terms of wealth distribution, with the north and northeast still lagging Bangkok. The military’s rule tends to foster economic disparities, since its development plans have been focused on Bangkok and its environs.
The country also looks unlikely to fight corruption. During the long run of pro-Thaksin party dominance, graft remained a major problem in Thailand, and the military and its political allies vowed that, once in power, they would clean the country up. But that has hardly happened—Transparency International notes that anti-corruption efforts are going nowhere in Thailand—and there is little reason to believe a Prayuth-led civilian government will make serious inroads now.
Divided, unstable politics also mean that the Thai government likely will be unable to make important reforms to the economy—the second-largest in Southeast Asia—and the education system, let alone upgrades to infrastructure, even as Thailand’s regional competitiveness lags and countries like Vietnam have become more attractive to investors. Until Thailand’s political divisions are truly resolved, one way or another, the kingdom’s future will remain murky.
Joshua Kurlantzick is senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.