As Pita Limjaroenrat took the stage in a brightly coloured shirt at Bangkok’s Pride parade on Sunday, June 4, supporters were confused about how to address the 42-year-old politician. Some called out, “Mr Prime Minister!” while their friends cautioned, “I don’t think you can call him that yet.”
Even after leading his party to a historic election victory in Thailand a month ago, Pita is still campaigning. He has to.
If Thailand were a normal democracy, Pita would already be in office. His Move Forward party won 14mn votes and 151 seats in the May 14 general election. Together with seats won by allied parties, the Move Forward tide represents a crushing blow to nine years of military rule.
But instead of setting up his office in Bangkok’s Government House and choosing a cabinet, Pita is still out in the streets, glad-handing supporters and interest group representatives as Thailand’s establishment reluctantly weighs allowing democracy to take its course.
On June 4, he smiled for photographs with Paetongtarn Shinawatra, who had been his main rival for the premiership, in a show of unity amid infighting in their fledgling coalition. The selfie queue was long and the media throng around him was thick as ever, as supporters and journalists alike sought elusive confirmation that he would be able to take office.
The triumph of Move Forward, Thailand’s young and progressive opposition, is a landmark in the country’s halting struggle for constitutional democracy. This began in earnest with the election in 2001 of self-styled populist prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Paetongtarn’s father, who was eventually thwarted by coups and military-affiliated parties. Thaksin’s Pheu Thai party won the most seats in every election since and was favoured for a repeat this year.
But last month Pita’s Move Forward party inherited the mantle of the pro-democracy movement, winning 151 seats, a stunning repudiation of the military-dominated status quo. Military-affiliated parties secured less than 20 per cent of the seats in the May election, a chilling blast of reality for the men in khaki that their time has passed.
In an interview with Nikkei Asia on May 27, Pita said the election was fundamentally about inequality in Thailand, a gap between rich and poor that he said has widened under the rule of General Prayuth Chan-ocha, who took power in a 2014 coup.
“It’s like we’re learning how to ride a bicycle, and this paternalistic person who knows better than the people tries to kick us off the bike each time, so our economic system cannot really prosper,” Pita told Nikkei. Move Forward’s answer to widening inequality, he said, is structural reform, starting with constitutional revision, a decentralised government, and monopoly busting.
“If you look 40 years in the past, the way we designed our economy was trickle-down. We invited foreigners to invest and export, but there was not a lot of development of the domestic economy. That is why we grew, but inequality grew even faster,” he said.
Move Forward wasted no time after clinching its victory in the late evening of May 14. By the next morning, Pita was declaring victory in front of the world’s media, saying he was ready to be “prime minister for all, whether you agree with me or disagree with me”.
Immediately his team began contacting seven pro-democracy parties to form a coalition government. He has spent recent weeks parlaying with the coalition on a joint agenda and ministerial portfolios. He met business and professional groups, in a bid to calm markets spooked by Move Forward’s antimonopoly and energy restructuring policies.
“It will be a seamless transition,” Pita told Nikkei. “There are not going to be any surprises the day I walk into Government House.”
But the caretaker government helmed by Prayuth is reluctant to hand over power. In late May, the incumbent prime minister scolded Pita’s transition team for requesting information from ministries.
“That is inappropriate,” Prayuth said. “Civil servants are still working with the current government. In the future, it will be your business.”
Many are pessimistic about a transition taking place at all. Despite its mandate, Pita’s coalition still faces immense hurdles before he can take power. First, he must sit out at least 60 days as the Election Commission checks every last detail in a decisive vote that attracted a record turnout of 75 per cent. With each day that passes, the leverage Pita’s party wields ebbs, and the chances increase that some trivial technicality will be found to nullify Move Forward’s victory. Second, Pita must sway dozens of senators to vote for him.
An elder statesman told Nikkei he was doubtful that Pita could win enough votes from the military-appointed senate to take office. A senior courtier close to King Maha Vajiralongkorn, the country’s ultimate power, also said the idea of a Move Forward government was “nuts” and predicted a long caretaker period under Prayuth.
“I’m not worried, but I’m not careless,” Pita said the day after the election, “but with the consensus that came out of the election, it will be quite a hefty price to pay for someone who is thinking of abolishing the election results or forming a minority government.”
Thailand’s turbulent past
Government House, a monumental Venetian gothic edifice from the 1920s, has been occupied since 2014 by Prayuth, the third longest-serving prime minister since a coup in 1932 abolished Siam’s absolute monarchy. Prayuth returned as prime minister after a general election in 2019 run under a military-drafted constitution — Thailand’s 22nd — promulgated in 2017.
He is the latest in a long list of military top brass who have held the top office. From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, “being a field marshal was the main qualification for becoming premier,” according to Puey Ungphakorn, a former governor of the Bank of Thailand.
The struggles for power between democratic movements and military-backed conservatives have always been intense. There have been 13 coups by military factions since 1932 and another nine attempts. With a few brief exceptions, every prime minister from 1948 to 1991 was a general. So far this century, two retired generals have been premier for over 10 years combined.
A growing number of Thais see this as a problem, largely because of the military’s mismanagement of the economy. Annual economic growth in Thailand has not reached 5 per cent since 2012, falling behind neighbours like Indonesia and Vietnam.
“First, you have to break the cycle of a military coup every seven years,” Pita told Nikkei. “You have to return faith and transparency and efficiency to elected politicians. [Otherwise] there is always an excuse to do a military coup.”
No smooth road ahead
The two largest challenges Pita faces before he can take office are the Election Commission’s scrutiny of his candidacy, and winning over the 250-member unelected senate. Under the 2017 constitution, prime ministers need to be endorsed by a majority of the Senate and lower house combined, which is at least 376 votes. Move Forward’s coalition with seven other parties has 312 lower house seats.
While the election process was widely regarded as clean by international and local observers, Thailand’s election bureaucracy has been extra-scrupulous about checking Move Forward’s votes. Pita also faces a serious electoral inquiry into shares in a now-defunct media company, ITV, that he failed to declare before running for parliament in 2019.
Pita has claimed the shares were in his name as the court-appointed administrator of his father’s will. On June 6, he said that he had transferred the shares to a relative “because in the future there may be attempts to restore ITV operations, which may become a problem”.
The accusations are all too familiar to Thailand’s democratic opposition. A similar complaint of owning undeclared media shares helped fell Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, co-founder and prime ministerial candidate of the disbanded Future Forward party, which later became Move Forward. After leading the party to third place in the 2019 election, Thanathorn was disqualified from politics.
Three months later, the party was dissolved for accepting a loan from Thanathorn, found by the Constitutional Court to be an illegal donation. In one fell swoop, the establishment took out Future Forward’s top three: Thanathorn, legal scholar Piyabutr Saengkanokkul and broadcaster Pannika Wanich were banned from running for office and being party executives for 10 years.
Pita, fourth on the party list, was Thanathorn’s handpicked heir; he could be next on the legal chopping block.
The greater obstacle to taking power, however, will be the Senate, which was appointed in 2019 in a mysterious process that was not made transparent in the Royal Gazette, the organ which normally publishes details of all public appointments.
Pita told Nikkei on May 27 that he believed 27 senators were already behind him, which means his team needs to convince about one more each day while the Election Commission vets the result.
“They are not dinosaurs, and it is not a bloc of 250,” Pita said. “It’s not going to be a personalised decision — whether you like Pita or dislike Pita, or whether you like Move Forward. It’s about finding common ground and a way out for Thailand.”
The Senate, however, voted unanimously for Prayuth in 2019 even after Pheu Thai won the most seats. But this time, 64 senators who opposed the chamber’s role in the selection of the prime minister could decide to follow the popular vote and endorse Pita. An analysis by Nikkei revealed that only eight out of those 64 came from the military and four from the police. In the group, there are 18 senators from the civil service, nine from the business world, five diplomats, five academics and four from the judiciary.
“The senators are not as united as they seemed four years ago,” said Prajak Kongkirati, professor of political science at Thammasat University. “Now they’re split between Prayuth and Prawit, and there are also independents,” he explained, referring to General Prawit Wongsuwan, deputy prime minister.
But the Senate’s red line is a signature policy for Move Forward. The party campaigned to amend Article 112 of the criminal code, the so-called lese-majesty laws that make it a crime to criticise or threaten the king and other senior royals. They seek to reform the finances of the royal household and military, and to bring the monarchy more in line with the constitution.
“People who voted for Move Forward don’t necessarily agree with all of their policies,” said a member of the Senate who voted for the party but has not decided on Pita’s premiership because of Article 112. “They’re just tired of old politics in Thailand.”
Pita’s journey to the top
Pita says he knew politics was his destiny from an early age. Nicknamed “Tim”, he was born in Bangkok, the elder of two sons of a family whose business is in agricultural products. The family expected him to succeed his father, but instead precipitated his political awakening by sending the 11-year-old Pita to study in New Zealand.
With little to do in a rural backwater, Pita began watching the parliamentary debates that his host mother had on television while doing household chores. “It became ingrained in me, influencing me more than my real family,” he told Nikkei before the election.
When Pita returned home to study finance at Thammasat University in the late 1990s, Thailand was in the throes of the Asian financial crisis, which stalled Thailand’s development and accelerated income inequality. The university is one of the centres of youth political activism in the kingdom, the site of a bloody massacre in 1976 when students were attacked on campus by police and rightwing paramilitary groups.
Two decades later the university was still a hotbed of progressive ideas. “That’s when I started to become interested in Thai politics and the complexity of it, the role of institutions within a democracy, and the transformation from absolute monarchy to a democratic constitutional monarchy,” Pita said.
A brief stint as a note taker in Government House exposed him to the reality of patronage politics and monopolised industries in Thailand. His political ideology was sealed at Harvard University amid the 2008 US presidential campaign. Many of his graduate school classmates went on to work for Barack Obama or Joe Biden, including speechwriter Cody Keenan and former Department of State spokesperson Ned Price.
“Politics is essentially who gets what, when. So if it’s a party backed by corporate lobbyists, they will design the legal framework and financial support to preserve the status quo in their industries. But if the political party comes from the grassroots, you are linked to the policies you deliver,” Pita said.
He briefly took over the family business after his father’s sudden death in 2006, interrupting his graduate studies to rescue the company, CEO Agrifood Co, from bankruptcy. He tried his hand at investment banking with Merrill Lynch and consulting with Boston Consulting Group, advising Thai government agencies and energy companies. He had been country head for Grab, then a new start-up in Thailand, for a year when he met Thanathorn.
They came from similar backgrounds, but by 2018 Thanathorn had resigned from his family’s electronics manufacturing company to start Future Forward with Piyabutr.
Impressed by Thanathorn during a speech at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand, Pita gave him a business card. Thanathorn called him a few days later, launching Pita’s political career with an invitation to join the new party.
A royal stumbling block
In late March, Thanathorn was on a stage in Chonburi province, warming up a small crowd for Pita’s arrival. As he spoke, two young women wearing Guy Fawkes masks — a figure associated with antimonarchical revolt — walked around with a sign. They invited members of the audience to place pink stickers on it to show support for either abolishing or amending Article 112 of the criminal code.
Pita placed his pink sticker under “abolish” as Tantawan Tuatulanon, 21, and Orawan Phuphong, 23, joined him on stage. The duo known as Tawan and Bam had recently ended a 52-day hunger strike, demanding the release of activists charged and held without bail for violating lese-majesty laws.
More than 200 people have faced lese-majesty charges since 2020, with a maximum sentence of 15 years. Demands for the release of lese-majesty prisoners — including a 15-year-old girl named Yok arrested on March 28 for participating in a protest — are a central cause for Move Forward’s young base. A court ordered Yok’s release five days after the election.
“While we are here at this rally, Yok is being prosecuted and detained under Article 112,” Pita told supporters at Move Forward’s final campaign rally. “She is only twice as old as my daughter Pipim.”
Pita has a seven-year-old child with his ex-wife, actress Chutima Teepanart.
Tens of thousands of university students and high schoolers in 2020 defied Covid-19 restrictions and court bans, initially to protest Future Forward’s dissolution, then to demand reforms to the monarchy and the resignation of Prayuth Chan-ocha’s government.
At the time, Pita and other Move Forward MPs spoke on behalf of the protesters on the floor of parliament. The first-term legislators broke a taboo by even discussing the monarchy in a legislative chamber.
Street demonstrations persisted through 2021 but lost momentum as differences arose among student protest leaders, many of whom were arrested. By 2022, when the Constitutional Court ruled to allow Prayuth to remain as prime minister, demonstrations had fizzled to a few hundred people.
But many Thais were clearly biding their time to make their ultimate protest at the ballot box. Move Forward swept 32 out of 33 districts in Bangkok, as well as provincial seats in the north, north-east and south that had been impenetrable strongholds for Pheu Thai and the Democrat party.
“Voters complained that candidates from other parties largely depend on just the party brand, or the political dynasty, or the power of vote buying,” said Prajak, the Thammasat professor.
Laddawan Tantivitayapitak, secretary-general of election watchdog Open Forum for Democracy Foundation (P-Net), said some voters had taken money but voted for Move Forward anyway. “In Bangkok, the party that we know didn’t give out money won,” she told reporters on May 17.
With meagre resources, Move Forward focused on a District 1 strategy, targeting college-age voters in each province’s urban first districts. Students would then return home and lobby their parents to vote for Move Forward, expanding the party’s age and geographical base.
One supporter was Jamie, a nursing instructor in her 60s, who told Nikkei she voted for Future Forward in 2019, eager for a progressive party to take over from Pheu Thai as leader of the pro-democracy camp. “I voted for Pheu Thai because you had no other choice, even if you didn’t fully agree with them,” she said.
Pheu Thai was founded by Thaksin Shinawatra after his original Thai Rak Thai party was disbanded by court order. Thai Rak Thai swept the 2001 election with populist policies that united the urban middle class and farmers in the north and north-east.
Many rural voters loyally recall economic prosperity under the premierships of Thaksin and his sister Yingluck Shinawatra, both of whom fled Thailand when they faced corruption charges.
In the final weeks of the election, public trust in Pheu Thai might have been affected by rumours of a coalition deal with General Prawit Wongsuwan’s Palang Pracharath party. “There is absolutely no deal with the generals,” Srettha Thavisin, a Pheu Thai prime ministerial candidate, told Nikkei ahead of the election. “Why would we work with the people responsible for the coup and for the downfall of the economy?”
Nonetheless, analysts say the rumour pushed democracy-minded voters to Move Forward. “People want to eliminate Prayuth and Prawit from government,” Thammasat University’s Prajak said. “Move Forward proved to the Thai people who want change that they had a straightforward, firm position.”
Now, the progressive movement is at a crossroads between governing and keeping faith with its ideals. One casualty could be Move Forward’s pledge to amend the lese-majesty laws, which was left out of a memorandum signed with its seven coalition partners, who are sensitive to monarchical reform.
However, Pita said his party would still introduce a bill to amend Article 112 alone in the new parliament, a deal-breaker for many senators.
Abandoning lese-majesty reform would alienate Move Forward’s base, who have shown themselves capable of pressing Pita and the party to hold the line. Recently, Move Forward revoked an invitation to Chart Pattana Kla, a two-seat party aligned with Prayuth, to join its coalition after supporters objected.
“My apologies,” Pita wrote on social media. “I’ll always remember that the party is bigger than any member, but bigger than the party are the people.”
A new era on the horizon?
Pita’s apology to supporters may well have been a warning for rivals seeking to thwart a Move Forward government — cutting off the head will not kill the movement.
While electoral rules allow parties to nominate up to three candidates for prime minister, Move Forward nominated only Pita, leaving it with no alternative should he be disqualified.
“We have our scenario analysis of how it could turn out and once we have those scenarios planned out, we have a strategic response to deal with it just to make sure that political uncertainties are minimised,” Pita told reporters in late May.
But public dissatisfaction with the status quo outlived Thanathorn’s disqualification and Future Forward’s dissolution.
“They will just get more and more support from the young generation,” a member of the Senate who asked to remain anonymous told Nikkei. “In future elections, Move Forward will come first again even if they fail this time. It’s a big problem for conservatives in Thailand.”
Move Forward’s party bylaws were designed to survive even without its key personalities, in a way that Pheu Thai would struggle without the Shinawatra family’s brand.
“There’s no parochialism, no political loyalties in the party system,” said Kunthida Rungruengkiat, who served as Future Forward’s deputy leader and was banned from politics along with Thanathorn. “We want to make sure the policies will survive without us.”
Additional reporting by Niyakarn Atiyudhakul and Anchalee Romruen.
A version of this article was first published by Nikkei Asia on June 7, 2023. ©2023 Nikkei Inc. All rights reserved.
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