Ben is joined by journalist Erin Cook to discuss last weekend’s national election in Thailand, which saw the progressive Move Forward win the most seats and set up prospects for a coalition government made up of parties that are not supporters of the royal and military elite that has run the country since the 2014 coup.
- Subscribe to Erin’s newsletter on Southeast Asian politics, Dari Mulut Ke Mulut
- Erin mentioned From Development to Democracy by Dan Slater and Joseph Wong
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The transcript is below the fold.
Ben: Welcome to the Tally Room podcast, I’m Ben Raue.
In today’s episode we’ll be going further afield to discuss last weekend’s election in Thailand. My guest today is Erin Cook. Erin is an Australian journalist based in Southeast Asia covering politics across the region. And she curates the Dari Mulut ke Mulut newsletter. Hello Erin.
Erin: Hi, how are you going?
Ben: Thanks for joining me.
So voters in Thailand cast their votes last Sunday in the first election in 4 years. There was a big swing to the Move Forward party and away from those parties that have been in power for really the last decade who are roughly aligned with the Thai royalty and the Thai military. They’ve been in power basically since the last coup took place in 2014.
Thai politics for the last few decades has been dominated by this rivalry between a series of political parties led by Thaksin Shinawatra and his successors. His sister took over after him. They managed to repeatedly win elections and hold government power, but on the other hand you had forces aligned with the military and the royalty who have taken power through coups in 2006 and 2014. And they did sort of maintain power in in a mostly free election in 2019
But this year’s election saw another political force take the lead. So Move Forward has won the most seats, narrowly outpolling the Pheu Thai party, the successor to the Shinawatra parties that held power prior to the previous coups.
Meanwhile the party of the current prime minister went backwards. Erin, where did Move Forward come from?
Erin: I am obsessed with this. It really does feel like they came out of nowhere, doesn’t it? So Move Forward kind of rose from the ashes of Future Forward which was an opposition party formed before the 2019 election. They did pretty well not as well as Move Forward has done, but they I think primary-wise ranked in third in 2019. So behind Pheu Thai and behind the governing party at the time, Palang Pracharat.
But I think the the writing was kind of on the wall for the political elites in Bangkok .They were a bit worried about you know this rising force that was deeply popular with young people and kind of agitating for for some old taboos within Thailand. Sort of not quite saying we don’t want the monarchy, but maybe more of a let’s talk about the role of the monarchy.
So shortly after that election, virtually I think the entire leadership of the party was disqualified from taking their seats as MPs and their position in the the opposition coalition was rolled back quite a bit, and then eventually the party was forcibly dissolved by the constitutional court.
And then Move Forward came from the ashes of that. The leader Pita was sort of a junior leader within Future Forward. So those connections are really deep. They’re very clearly linked even as they’ve tried to say sort of you know we’re not Future Forward, we’re a different party.
And they have spent those four years since 2019 continuing to build a very very broad progressive base. And they’ve done an amazing job of building a coalition between you know these quiet ah you know for Thailand quite out there political views, got to get rid of the lèse-majesté laws, got to roll back the military, get rid of forcible conscription, that sort of thing.
Along with just middle class people that are sick of the back and forth, the coups between Pheu Thai, Thaksin and the military. So they’ve developed a really really broad progressive base that I think people saw coming but after the win on Sunday it’s much broader than I think anybody kind of expected.
Ben: Pheu Thai and its predecessors, the Thaksin movement, they were seen very much as a sort of populist which safe to say party that they had a kind of populist to agenda. But I’ve seen some people describe Move Forward as social democratic actually, as being a bit more clearly progressive of the left.
Whereas Pheu Thai was, they weren’t anti-monarchy but they were a bit more distant and they had their own agenda a bit.
So what is that difference there between them? Because they’re both clearly not fans of military coups and maybe want to rein in the monarchy a bit but um beyond that there there clearly are differences.
Erin: Yeah I think it says a lot, maybe about when when the parties were formed and when they became sort of popular parties. For Pheu Thai, coming along in the 2000s that’s very much still peak King Bhumibol, the previous King who died just before the 2019 election. So that’s 20 years before his death and the monarchy is still deeply deeply popular and unquestionable. Not on the table at all.
Whereas for Move Forward and Future Forward, coming along twenty years later. The succession has happened. The new king isn’t as beloved, isn’t as deeply popular as his father was, and there’s a new generation now who has grown up with the decline of the previous king, the rise of the new one and don’t feel that sort of pressure to be deeply honoring of the monarchy.
There’s more space now to be able to question that place to say hang on I want a say in the shape of Thailand in the years to come. That was not the way twenty years ago and I think that’s the key difference. It’s also probably reflective of the generational shift that we see all across Southeast Asia with an enormous shift from Gen X and Baby Boomers into this massive millenial and Gen Z group that are all digital natives. Raised as children through the financial crisis and then the political upsets of that and are now again living through another economic crisis or potential crisis.
I think that’s really changed the arithmetic on who you’re backing. If you want welfare cards to to pay for the bus then Pheu Thai’s your people. If you want a restructuring of the economy that looks forward towards digital first, more research, more development then Move Forward’s your people.
Ben: On the surface Thailand can look a little bit like, when you look at its constitutional structures, a bit like a European constitutional monarchy. But one key difference which I think is partly legal partly cultural is the monarchy is much more active, right? Like the British monarchy, the Dutch monarchy, the Scandinavian monarchies or whatever very much are kept in their box and understand that their role is not to intervene in politics. Whereas both, I mean you mentioned the lèse-majesté laws which which make it very illegal to be critical of the time monarchy.
And the position that they’re held in society is very different to like the role of King Charles in the UK or something. And that seems quite crucial to what has happened, and that seems to have been linked in with the military and its role in bringing down previous governments. I mean there’s been a bunch of coups but particularly the coups in 2006 and 2014
Erin: There’s a really interesting sort of aspect here about Move Forward. In 2019 and then kind of into the pandemic, there was a resurgent pro-democracy movement with a lot of protests targeting specifically the lèse-majesté laws. There’s a fifteen year old who got released on bail yesterday because she was done under lèse-majesté. An old fella got done for posting pictures of rubber ducks which is kind of the equivalent of you know a Peppa Pig about Xi Jinping or Winnie the Pooh.
All these sorts of very quite like low hanging fruit are being swept up in this new sort of proof of power from the new king. But Move Forward, rather than back away from this conversation, a couple of the MPs-to-be were deeply involved with these protest movements. So they’ve kind of embraced this conversation rather than shied off it which Pheu Thai typically has in the past.
Ben: Now you mentioned Bangkok, the elites in Bangkok. On the Wikipedia page for the thai election there’s a useful map showing the distribution of the vote for the three. Move Forward, Pheu Thai and United Thai Nation that’s now the kind of primary party of the kind of current government. Not the only one by any means but sort of the primary one.
United Thai Nation’s support much stronger in the south, Pheu Thai support much stronger in the north which I believe has always been the trend, and Move Forward seemed particularly strong around Bangkok, the middle of the country. They’re kind of the dense small physically small areas around there.
Erin: Thailand is really interesting in this respect. I think out of all of the elections that I watch in the region Thailand is the most that is dependent upon geography. Like we see that a bit in Indonesia but not to this extent where you can see where the provinces switch from central to north and that sort of thing.
So the north has been longtime Thaksin Shinawatra’s stomping ground. They back him in droves. A lot of the protests in the two previous coups were you know supporters from the north trucked into Bangkok. So the party doing okay up there still is to be expected.
Although Joel Selway, who’s an excellent academic, wrote a piece for Thai Enquirer this week looking at the voting data that’s been released so far. He says that sort of Pheu Thai stronghold in the north may be shifting as the generations shift. Still too early to tell of course, but that’s maybe just as much of a sign of the changing demography as Move Forward’s win.
The south is always a weird one. I’m not too familiar with the south I always get a bit too in the weeds about the southern insurgency and read too much into that. But my impression is that the south typically supports military-aligned parties, because of that long running insurgency along the Malaysia border which is fairly straightforward.
The enormous win in Bangkok is stunning to me. Move Forward’s picked up 32 of 33 races there. Which makes for a really compelling future. The common wisdom is that when there’s a people’s movement prior or after a coup, it’s people shipped in from the north to support Pheu Thai or shipped in from the south to support the royalists.
If something goes pear shaped with Move Forward holding government, or taking government, you’ve now got millions of Bangkokians who are middle class. That’s a very different game and that’s going to look very different if it turns as violent as it has in the past.
Ben: Let’s talk a little bit about the voting system and the constitutional structure a bit. So there’s a House of Representatives, 500 members, directly elected. There’s also a Senate, 250 members, basically appointed by the old military junta before they stepped out and so ah, maybe not universally, but overwhelmingly royalist, pro-military, not big fans of Move Forward I’m sure.
In the house they use a system called mixed member majoritarian or parallel voting system. A similar system is used in Japan and Italy. The way it works is there are a bunch of individual electorates that use first-past-the-post. And then there’s also a proportional element but the the two don’t interact, it’s not compensatory. Those extra seats, those ones are proportional, but it doesn’t do anything to undo any disproportionality that exists in the rest.
So the alternative system, mixed member proportional, where those PR seats are distributed in a way to counterbalance the the single member seats. They actually used that system in 2019 and that’s what they use in Germany, New Zealand, Scotland, places like that. It does actually make it a bit fairer and they’ve moved away from that this year which I thought was really interesting and I think it’s had an effect in the results, because 400 of the 500 seats are these first-past-the-post seats, these single member districts. So. It’s not a very proportional system.
And from what I see, Move Forward, they did win the most local electorate seats but they didn’t win as many as their vote would suggest. They won 28% of the first-past-the-post seats and as far as I can tell they won about 39% of the vote. So overall they’re on track for about 30% of the seats even though they won almost 40% of the vote.
It’s also true for Pheu Thai, whereas on the other hand there’s a bunch of small parties that won quite a few electorates with very small shares of the vote. So that’s really interesting.
I think it probably has hurt the opposition in this election that you know they do have a majority if you put together Move Forward and Pheu Thai in the House (we’ll get to the Senate), but not as big a majority as they would have done if they’d used the 2019 system for example.
[start here]
Erin: The way it’s all been reworked since the 2014 coup and especially with the constitution in 2017, I think this is another sort of tactic from the elite to just consistently change the rules in a way that would favour perhaps not their parties but favour anybody against Pheu Thai. Like Thaksin Shinawatra is the spectre that haunts Bangkok. I always suspect that everything’s aimed at him.
But that’s really interesting. I find it very difficult to understand. And I don’t understand, if you work in the market on the outskirts of Chiang Mai, how are you going to understand this?
Ben: People just have to know how to vote in their area, I guess. but what it does mean is if you expected (and it didn’t quite happen this way) that there’s vast regions of the north where Thaksin’s successor parties, Pheu Thai, people like that, are racking up massive majorities and they’re winning, they’re not just winning 50%, but they’re winning 80-90% things like that, those votes are going to waste.
Whereas if you had a proportional system they would win more seats there. So it does give an advantage to a side that wins their seats by smaller majorities and doesn’t waste their votes. In the same way that in the US House of Representatives the Republicans have a slight advantage because the Democrats rack up these enormous majorities in big cities.
I think there’s an element of that in Thailand as well. That may have made them think this will help the government parties, the pro-coup, pro-military parties.
That’s my theory I haven’t been paying attention to this till quite recently. But that that majoritarian element, in this case, you would often expect that it would favour the big parties but it appears to have favoured those smaller pro-government parties that don’t get an enormous vote but get it in the right places.
And I mean I won’t go into anything about how they drew the electoral boundaries and whether that was fair or not, because that may have also been an element as well and I haven’t looked enough into the data. But that’s the system.
The one other thing here that’s crucial is the prime ministership is not decided by just having a majority in the House. You need a majority in a joint sitting of the parliament which means it includes those 250 members in the Senate, which again I doubt all 250 would would it be against them but a large majority of them would be favouring the current government party.
So you need 376 votes for a majority and Move Forward and Pheu Thai between them have 293. So they need to find another eighty-odd votes between smaller parties in the House and maybe a few senators who are willing to respect their mandate or whatever. Where do you think that’s going to go?
Erin: I’ve seen a few sort of scenarios particularly from the academics I think Susannah Paton at Lowy Institute had a really great piece this week about it as well. So the most likely scenario from what I understand is that some senators that are a bit more flexible than some of the others will likely support Move Forward and Pheu Thai. At least initially.
And that’ll stop any nascent protest movement. I know that Thailand is very much on edge that something will you know bubble up in the next few weeks
And there’s two months. The new government won’t take effect for another sixty days so there’s plenty of time to to work it all out.
So yeah, that sort of respecting the mandate thing seems the most likely, which I think is a really interesting way to do that.
Putting Move Forward and Pheu Thai together is going to have you know, just regular coalition issues. Pheu Thai has always been top dog and now it’s not which is never nice.
And I think Move Forward is really going to struggle with governing. It’s the same problem with any sort of startup progressive party. You can say all sorts of things about the way the country should be run.
In practice if you don’t want to get knocked out by an army coup then you’re going to have to rein it in a little bit. For Move Forward, their supporters want to see you know a reform to the lèse-majesté laws or an economic restructuring and those are the kind of things that are a direct threat to political elites.
So whether senators support this and then let them hang themselves with their own noose or stop it now, I think it’s more likely that they’ll let them through and then see where it goes.
Ben: It’s really fascinating what Thailand’s relationship with democracy is. Because there is a certain amount of respect for democracy, to a limit. But then there are forces that are… you know, it does make me think sometimes of the early nineteenth century or something in the UK where you had this sort of tension between the forces of order and the forces of democracy that were slowly inching forward but and royalty still has a role, the military still has an outsized influence.
But you know this isn’t Myanmar. There was an expectation that they would go back to a democratic system and, you know they have what seemed to be largely free elections, mostly fair, mostly maybe not quite meeting the standards of some countries.
Erin: As a whole the election, not to speak of the way boundaries have been drawn and the constitution in 2017 and all that. But on the day and in the lead up it has been largely safe.
Which in this region is enough sometimes. It was safe. There were, you know, the sort of reports that you get everywhere, like old ladies struggling to get into the booth and that sort of thing. But largely things went pretty well and I think that’s a low bar but it’s also a good sign.
Ben: I’m really fascinated by the Senate as well because you see the arguments that were made about its creation was about compromise and ensuring moderation and this kind of thing. But it’s one of those things where it’s like when you create an appointed Senate that has that kind of bias that sort of pressure for compromise and moderation only goes one way.
A different kind of government would have a free hand in the Senate and, I mean the history of upper houses in in Australia in the nineteenth century was they were all very conservative institutions and were spun the same way. But what it effectively meant was certain governments would get everything blocked and other governments would have a free hand in everything sailing through the upper house.
So I assume even if they can form government whether they can get legislation passed, make reforms that they want to have happen, who knows how much of that they’ll be able to get done. Because it’s not just a house of review, it’s very much a house that represents a particular kind of attitude in Thai politics. That’s not going to be in line with the new government if there is a new government.
Erin: That’s it. There’s a very very interesting book that came out either at the start of this year or the end of last year From Development to Democracy. Unbelievable, very good.
And it in one chapter compares the experience of Indonesia getting its military out of meddling in government with Thailand which has had similar experiences but in a much more dramatic way.
They kind of just said, you know in Indonesia there was an existing political party, Golkar, which gave the military and military-aligned elite an excellent off ramp into electoral politics that has effectively kept the military out since the fall of Suharto.
Whereas in Thailand these sort of conservative parties don’t have the infrastructure Golkar had. They don’t really have any sort of, not that anybody ever celebrates Indonesian political parties for their ideologies, but they don’t have much of an ideological base. They’re all very much about you know cults of personality and that sort of thing.
And that’s really keeping the military elite in this sort of pattern of back and forth, back and forth.
Ben: They want them to still have a role. They’re not willing to give up that tool.
Erin: That’s it and without a party there is no offramp to that and then of course there’s a monarchy which is a third issue that Indonesia doesn’t have to deal with, so in that respect different.
Ben: So Thailand’s also a neighbour to Myanmar. What does a potential change of government in Thailand mean for what’s been going on there?
Erin: This is huge. I think this election has been very very closely watched in Myanmar and with the exile community that of course lives in Thailand now. Most of Myanmar’s media is worked out of Chiang Mai now so a lot of people watching it very very closely.
The relationship between Thailand and Myanmar in the last couple of years of the Prayut Chan-o-cha government hasn’t been particularly inspiring for people who’d like to see peace return to Myanmar.
The militaries are really really close together so there was just no chance whatsoever of Prayut Chan-o-cha pulling the junta into line over in Myanmar.
So there’s very much a hope that with Move Forward taking government, if and when that happens, that Thailand will become a really really strong advocate for the pro-democracy movement there. Even in just like a sort of base level a change in government’s going to be really good.
The first year of the Myanmar junta, Thailand quietly was happy for Myanmar nationals to jump across the border and you know waited out in Chiang Mai and other cities along the the border in the north.
But there have been increasing numbers of dissidents that are forcibly returned by Thai police and things like that. So I think Move Forward is far less likely to get involved in that and far more likely to make a stand whether through ASEAN or in the bilateral relationship. So I think that’s that’s a really exciting part of of what’s happening here.
Ben: So that’s about it for this episode of the Tally Room podcast. Thank you Erin for joining me.
Erin: Thank you so much for having me. Um.
Ben: You can find this podcast on your podcast app of choice. If you like the show please consider rating or reviewing us on iTunes. You can follow the Tally Room on Mastodon at @tallyroom@mastodon.au or like us on Facebook.
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And if you’re interested in politics in Southeast Asia I would also recommend signing up for Erin’s newsletter Dari Mulut ke Mulut. And I’m a paid subscriber so consider signing up. It’s great and there’s a sort of a spinoff newsletter at the moment just about the Indonesian election that’s coming next year as well, right Erin?
Erin: Yes, that one’s huge third biggest in the world. Well third, biggest democracy in the world.
Ben: Yeah, cool. Well maybe we’ll talk about doing another episode in February when that comes along hey?
Erin: Beautiful.
Ben: Information about this podcast is available at tallyroom.com.au and you can email questions or feedback to thetallyroom[at]Gmail.com. Thanks to Chris Dubrow for writing the music you hear in this episode. Once again, thanks for listening.
