To avoid repeating past failures, key leaders of the main opposition People’s Party (PP) are urging voters not only to support them but to propel the party to a landslide victory on 8 February. They argue that only by winning more than half of the seats in the House of Representatives can the party be assured in forming the next government.
Many supporters were left heartbroken when then Move Forward Party leader Pita Limjaroenrat failed to become prime minister, later reflecting on the experience in a Thai-language book titled in English The Almost Prime Minister.
On 7 August 2024, more than a year after the 2023 general election, the Move Forward Party (MFP) was disbanded by the Constitutional Court in a ruling that banned Pita and other executives from politics for 10 years. The party is now known as the People’s Party and is led by a much less charismatic leader, Mr. Natthapong Ruengpanyawut.
With three weeks left before the election, both the People’s Party and Natthapong are leading in most polls, although winning half the parliamentary seats is no guarantee and there is fear that the deep state will sabotage the party’s bid to form the next government, regarding the party as too radical and anti-establishment.
Truth be told, the People’s Party is no longer campaigning for the amendment of the anachronistic and draconian royal defamation law since the dissolution of the MFP. The court deemed it an attempt to overthrow the political system. Thus, there is no longer an earth-shattering call to reform the monarchy institution this time by People’s Party leaders and candidates.
On the military issue, the People’s Party used to call for wide-ranging reforms of the Thai military, long regarded as a state within a state, addicted to staging coups and holding an unfair proportion of radio waves and TV stations. The People’s Party now proposes drafting a new constitution with greater public participation, overhauling independent agencies in a bid to permanently end the legacy of power succession by coup-makers.
The party also plans to abolish compulsory military conscription and replace it with a voluntary system, while increasing welfare benefits and fair compensation to build a professional military that is transparent and accountable.
The military is enjoying a renewed popularity, more popular than any other time over the past two decades, due to their ‘successful’ war waged against Cambodia which led Thailand to occupy a dozen of disputed spots along the Thai-Cambodian border. As a result, the People’s Party is no longer portraying the Thai military as a burden to democracy.
Last week Pita, who is still active as one of the so-called ‘spiritual leaders’ of the party, even issued a public apology for having questioned, two years ago, what the Thai military are good for.
Additionally, the People’s Party has elevated the crackdown on scammers to a national agenda through a three-tier strategy: sealing loopholes in the financial system, dismantling border strongholds in Cambodia, and linking global networks to resolve the problem comprehensively. It therefore came as no surprise when the party’s current leader and prime ministerial candidate recently told the press that he supported the use of Gripen fighter jets to bomb targets in Cambodia, as the military insists they were attacking scam centres, although no definitive proof has been provided.
Given these significant changes in their stance on the monarchy and the military, it is fair to ask whether the People’s Party is a tamed or even mutated version of Move Forward Party.
The party’s new focus is on bringing in senior professionals and former top bureaucrats into the fold as prospective Cabinet members. While I welcome some of the people on the revealed Cabinet member list such as former Thammasat University dean of Faculty of Science for Learning and Education and one-time head of the progressive Thammasat Secondary School Anuchart Puangsamlee who on 7 January was formally introduced as prospective education minister under a People’s Party-led government and whom I have known personally for decades and believe that he would be more than qualified, the same cannot be said of the party’s prospective foreign minister, Mr. Pisan Manawapat.
Pisan was appointed as Thai Ambassador to Washington D.C following the May 2014 military coup led by Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha, yet he is now denying that he had ever supported the 2014 military coup. Do you really think dictator Gen Prayut chose someone who doesn’t support him and the junta as Thai Ambassador to Washington D.C.?
An article by The Washington Diplomat back in 2016 suggests otherwise, however, as the article stated that the New York Times wrote that, “After seizing power last year, General Prayuth [Chan-ocha] promised elections and a return to civilian rule of law,” wrote the New York Times editorial board in April 2015. “Not only do those promises remain unfulfilled, but General Prayuth, in place of martial law, has now granted himself sweeping executive, legislative and judicial powers under Article 44 of Thailand’s interim Constitution.”
The article on The Washington Diplomat went on to say that Pisan then wrote a letter to NYT defending the military junta.
“The ambassador struck back on those accusations in a response to the New York Times in which he wrote that, “Since May 2014, Thailand’s leaders have lifted the country out of political paralysis and violence. Until then, Thailand’s version of democracy was plagued by rampant corruption, abuse of power and absence of rule of law.”
In case you wonder why Pisan was chosen by the People’s Party, despite such disturbing record, it is worth noting that Pisan, who later became a junta-appointed senator, was among the minority of the junta-appointed senate members who voted in the failed bid to support Pita as PM. Natthapong says the man has changed, and the past is not of importance.
This invites a more pointed question: how—and how much—has the party changed since it was the Move Forward Party? Even some from within the party are asking whether the party has changed and lost its identity.
On 6 January, former People’s Party MP Ms. Kanyapat Rachitaroj posted a message on the X platform stating that she had officially decided to resign from her membership of the People’s Party.
She wrote that she had drafted this message before the announcement of the party-list results, in order to avoid accusations that she was acting out of spite after failing to get through, or that if she did get through, she would once again be told to “sit on her hands.”
Kanyapat said she had been thinking about this decision for around six months in total—dating back to the time she was told by her own party to raise her hand in support of Anutin Charnvirakul, Bhumjai Thai Party leader. Kanyapat went on to say that, in her view, the party has now changed and that the party wants enough numbers to form a government that it has to “swallow blood” and compromise in order to obtain state power, otherwise it will forever be belittled as a party that has never governed.
She reminded readers that the party won mass support precisely because it was itself, adding that one senior party leader once said that the party would not accept outside ministers or an outsider prime minister—everyone should be an MP, because they were truly elected by the people.
Kanyapat stated: “You can bring in hundreds more technocrats, professors, PhDs, and elites, but they are not worth as much as a single person with ideals who has to leave. Hundreds of doctors cannot replace people like Luk-kade, TOTO, Kaewta, or P’Mart. For me, I want to clarify that I respect the senior academics and professionals who may come in as outside cabinet members. But I place greater importance on those who have spent sufficient time with the party, who carry the party’s DNA, and who understand its identity….
“How far back do we have to retreat? You might say the retreat is to gain more conservative votes or swing voters in order to obtain power. Obtaining power is good—anyone who runs to be an MP and does not want to be in government would be unusual. But if we keep making ‘great grand compromises’ like this, then what is the point of winning in the first place?
“I want to ask you: have you ever looked at yourselves in the mirror and seen how much you have changed? Have you forgotten why you entered politics in the first place? Most importantly, you have turned friends into enemies, continually losing allies, because one leader said that people would have to choose us anyway because they have no alternative. The people are not a given. I insist on this as an ordinary citizen today—the final decision lies with the people,” Kanyapat wrote.
I also noted many months ago that Natthapong once posted photos of himself volunteering to help with the celebration of the current King’s coronation celebrations. One wonders why Natthapong eventually joined a party known to be critical of the monarchy institution instead of many other parties which claim to be royalist. There was a missing part of his ‘origin story’ and he had never clarified the matter publicly beyond saying that he would resign if the party seeks to abolish the monarchy institution. While everyone has an origin story, I feel that something about Natthapong’s is amiss. After all, Bruce Wayne didn’t become batman without a crucial origin story where, when he was a boy, his parents were killed in front of him.
Thinking about how the People’s Party is different from MFP, and whether it is a diluted version of its former self reminds me of some well-known foreign restaurants in Bangkok.
Anyone who has tried a foreign restaurant chain in Thailand knows the pattern: opening day brilliance, followed by a slow but unmistakable decline. Once the foreign chef who designed the kitchen flies home, the recipes are adjusted, intentionally or not, shortcuts creep in, and the food gradually mutates—no longer quite what it was.
This makes me think of the People’s Party, which has changed its “head chef” many times within just a few short years. As for the Democrat Party, it kept changing until things fell apart—so much so that the old chef, Abhisit Vejjajiva, had to now return to take personal charge of the kitchen. But the story about Abhisit is for another column.
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