The Ebb and Flow of Protest in Thailand

The usually tumultuous world of Thai politics has been relatively quiet of late. The youth-led protests that captured the world’s attention throughout 2020-2021 all but disappeared in 2022. The energy and enthusiasm for politics on Thai social media, which played such a crucial role in driving the protests, now feels depleted. The valiant effort young Thais sustained for two years against an unwavering regime has left many of them feeling burnt out.

They aren’t the only ones – even Thailand’s politicians are apparently weary of politics. Parliament has failed to reach its quorum so many times recently that the prime minister was compelled to remind members of their responsibility to attend sessions. Now that a general election is scheduled for May, the actual work of politics – for example, debating and voting on bills – has been dropped, as the politicians busy themselves with preparing their campaigns.

With street politics halted and parliamentary politics effectively on hold until the election, Thailand feels in limbo. There is a sense that the country is taking a collective break: stopping to catch its breath after a difficult few years of protests and pandemic, and bracing itself for whatever might come when the polls open later this year. For observers of Thai politics, who at times may struggle to keep up with the constant intrigue and drama, the lull offers time and space to reflect on all that has happened and make some forecasts about what may lie ahead.

The Rise of the Youth Movement

When the protests began in 2020, they seemed to be all about political representation. The five long years of military rule that followed the coup in 2014 had built up significant anticipation around the 2019 election, especially for younger Thais who were first-time voters. Adding to the excitement was the arrival of a new party, Future Forward, whose youthful image and progressive platform mirrored the identity and aspirations of the younger Thais who supported it.

When the flawed election returned coup-maker General Prayut Chan-o-cha to power, however, those young Thais were angry and dejected. They persevered with Thailand’s procedural democracy until the following year, when Future Forward was dissolved by a dubious, politically-motivated ruling from the Constitutional Court.

Protests against the dissolution of Future Forward were held on university campuses around Bangkok in February 2020, attracting thousands. Long dismissed as politically apathetic, young Thais had suddenly found their voice – and were loudly condemning the perceived interference in the democratic process by the military and the courts.

The momentum of those protests was interrupted as the pandemic started making its way around the world and politics temporarily took a back seat to public health. But before the mass rallies resumed again that July, a smaller demonstration hinted at the new, more radical direction the movement would take.

In June, a few dozen activists protested in downtown Bangkok to demand answers regarding the forced disappearance of 37-year-old exiled dissident Wanchalerm Satsaksit, who was snatched and bundled into a van outside his apartment in neighboring Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. Wanchalerm was just the latest of several critics of the Thai monarchy to disappear while exiled in either Laos or Cambodia. Having fled Thailand to evade the lèse-majesté law, which punishes anyone deemed to have “insulted” the king, the exiles had allegedly been hunted down, abducted, and killed.

Discontent with the country’s highest institution had been growing, quietly, for years. But the disappearance of activists like Wanchalerm gave it a harder edge, and helped bring the anger out into the open. When the larger demonstrations against the government began again from July 2020 onward, the protesters added monarchy reform to their list of demands, breaking long-held taboos and shaking the Thai social and political order to its core.

As if taking on the country’s monarchy, military, and courts wasn’t enough, the young protesters began venting about a host of other social grievances, expanding their support base as they did so. For school-aged kids, reform of the country’s militarized and archaic education system was high on the agenda. Since the coup in 2014, things had gone from bad to worse in classrooms. With junta diktats like Prayut’s “12 Core Values” added to the curriculum, school became an even more intolerable experience for young minds.

Inspired by the global LGBTQ movement, some protesters also threw their support behind issues like the legalization of same-sex marriage. Drag queens reinvented themselves as protest leaders, and the bright colors of the pride flag became ubiquitous at rallies.

For hip young entrepreneurs who wanted to develop a local craft beer industry in Thailand, laws protecting big beverage corporations became emblematic of how unfair the economy was. The protesters began making connections between the structural powers they were trying to bring down and the oligarchs who were propping them up.

What at first seemed like a straightforward movement for a fair democratic process and representation had grown into something much more far-reaching. No social institution or cultural norm was safe from criticism as young Thais began re-imagining their country and their future.

The Decline of the Youth Movement

At times, the energy and hope of the 2020-21 protests could leave even the outside observer with a sense – commonly felt during large protest events – that “everything is possible.” For the young protagonists at the heart of things, this feeling must have been intoxicating. The more cultural taboos they broke, the more exhilarating it was. The more they imagined their new world, the more the old one seemed to be crumbling. And if the regime at times seemed on the back foot, then it was surely evidence that victory was imminent and big changes were coming.

Instead, it was the movement itself that faltered and faded away, which in retrospect was always the most likely of conclusions.

One problem the movement had was a lack of clarity over its demands. Inspired by the “five demands” of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, the Thai movement initially put forward their own “three demands”: the dissolution of parliament, the drafting of a new constitution, and “ending intimidation of the people.” When a further “ten demands” for monarchy reform were introduced soon after, as well as the various single-issue causes like education reform, marriage equality, and ending oligopoly, the protests started to lose coherence. The strength of the movement – that it challenged so many aspects of Thai society at once – was also a critical weakness.

Another strength that became a weakness was the movement’s roots in youth culture and identity. During Thailand’s five years of outright military rule from 2014 to 2019, subcultures like punk, rap, skateboarding, graffiti, and so on had been growing more and more political. Being anti-establishment suddenly became what the cool kids were doing, and this eventually helped the protests to go mainstream among young people. But at a certain point, the movement needed to build alliances across generations in order to grow and affect change. The pink hair, piercings, and baggy jeans may have made that harder to achieve. Even those older Thais who sympathized with the movement and supported its aims would have felt out of place if they actually joined it.

The Thai elites – comprised of the palace, military, powerful bureaucrats, and oligarchs – remained cohesive in the face of the protests. The government showed no sign of making concessions and were intent on maintaining composure as they weathered the storm. Even when the movement went after the revered monarchy – an affront that surely gave establishment figures an aneurysm – the protests were, for the most part, handled with patience and guile.

Unlike Thai protests in the past, the army stayed clear of the streets, allowing the police to do the job of containing and controlling them instead. This was more in line with international standards, decreased the chance of dangerous escalation, and provided optics that were less damaging to Thailand’s global reputation.

The authorities were reluctant to crack down too harshly on young, often middle-class, protesters. The goal instead was to frustrate the movement by stonewalling it until it exhausted itself. When rallies approached sensitive areas, large shipping containers were brought in and stacked on top of one another to create an unscalable barrier. With police standing well back on the other side, the opportunity for clashes was reduced. The sudden appearance of massive shipping containers at famous Bangkok locations like the Grand Palace was a strange sight that drew much derision. Yet, it kind of worked. As a strategy for containing protests – by quite literally using containers – the tactic lay somewhere between the ridiculous and the sublime.

The regime also made sagacious use of the powerful legal tools at its disposal. At the peak of the protests, when passions and crowd numbers were at their highest, the authorities seemed aware that arresting movement leaders risked provoking an angry backlash. Instead, they bided their time until the movement started to wither. Then, as the number of protesters on the streets dropped, the amount of criminal charges levied at protest leaders began to rise.

From minor infringements of pandemic regulations all the way to serious crimes like lèse-majesté and sedition, protest leaders were hit with numerous counts of multiple different charges – so many that even the accused lost track of how many they were facing in total. Cases were drawn out interminably, paused, and then resumed again at will. Bail was denied, granted, then revoked, then granted again. The goal was less about enforcing the law and more about exhausting and distracting the movement leaders.

The legal pressure had its desired effect. With core leaders like Arnon Nampa, Parit “Penguin” Chiwarak, and Panusaya “Rung” Sithijirawattanakul spending long periods in pre-trial detention, or out on bail with ankle bracelets and forbidden from attending protests, the movement suffered.

Meanwhile, the protesters on the ground were getting frustrated by the lack of results, and began questioning the movement’s direction. Cracks started to appear, bickering broke out, and a heated online discussion went back and forth for weeks about whether to stick to more peaceful, non-violent protests or whether it was time to go “Hong Kong-style” – an allusion to the willingness of some Hong Kong protesters in 2019 to engage in vandalism and direct physical altercations with police.

In the end, some protesters did confront the police more directly in a series of rowdy demonstrations outside the Bangkok housing project Din Daeng Flats, where they launched fireworks at the police, then played cat and mouse games with them on motorbikes. But most of the crowds who had thronged the earlier rallies stayed well away, and the protests eventually fizzled out.

Cycles of Contention in Thailand

Thailand has been though all this many times before. Numerous well-known “protest years” stand out in the country’s timeline: the 1932 revolution; the 1973 Thai popular uprising; the 1976 massacre; Black May 1992; the 2010 Red Shirt protests. Young Thais who feel despondent that their movement was unable to sustain itself might take some comfort in knowing that the protests of 2020-21 will now take their place in this historical canon.

But on either side of these bursts of intense political protest are periods of relative calm, like the one Thailand is currently experiencing. This suggests a pattern, which will eventually lead to yet another protest. This is known in the academic literature as “cycles of contention” – the idea that the levels of political contention in a society ebb and flow over time.

A cyclical tendency has also been observed in relation to Thai politics specifically. Around 40 years ago, the late Chai-Anan Samudavanija introduced the idea of the “vicious cycle” of Thai politics, which moved from coup, to a period of military rule, to the drafting of a new constitution, to an election, to parliamentary process, to conflict, to crisis, then on again to another coup, and so on. Thailand has already seen two full turns of Chai-Anan’s cycle in the 21st century. The protests of 2020-21 could be considered a partial turn.

At the core of Thailand’s contentious politics are two different understandings of what type of polity it should be. On one side are those – like the youth movement  – who wish for Thailand to be a modern nation-state, with all citizens having equal rights under a constitution, to which even the monarchy is bound. They believe elected representatives should run the country on behalf of the public.

On the other side are those with a more traditional understanding, who place the monarchy at the center of Thai life. They distrust both the electorate and elected politicians. In their view, state institutions like the military, courts, and bureaucracies should run the country on behalf of the king, and enjoy certain privileges for doing so.

A Contentious Election in 2023? 

Whatever Thailand’s confusing surfeit of similarly-named political parties say about how to stop floods, or ways to solve traffic jams, or whether or not marijuana should be legalized, the viewpoints mentioned above  – constitutionalism versus traditionalism  – are what really separates them. And voters will by and large cast their ballots according to where on that ideological spectrum they themselves sit. This leaves us with two broad scenarios for the May elections, both of which unfortunately have a high chance of leading to a new cycle of contention.

In the first scenario, the constitutionalists are able to form a government. This would involve the Pheu Thai Party either winning in the landslide they have been claiming they will achieve and forming a majority government, or coming first without a majority and forming a coalition with the Move Forward Party and others. As things stand, Thaksin Shinawatra’s youngest daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, would most likely be prime minister. This would provoke some sort of reaction from the traditionalists, who may try to topple the new government by means of military coup, judicial coup, or initiating a conservative street movement.

In the second scenario, the traditionalists form a government. This would look more or less the same as the current coalition, with Prayut Chan-o-cha, Prawit Wongsuwan, or Anutin Charnvirakul currently the most likely to emerge as prime minister. If this happens, it would almost certainly re-energize the youth movement, especially if any part of the electoral process is perceived as being illegitimate. This outcome may even lead to the re-emergence of the Red Shirts, some of whom made cameo appearances in support of the youth movement in 2020-21.

The group of politicians who find themselves on the losing side may decide to support a mobilization, creating what is known in the literature as a “political opportunity” for protests to emerge.

It’s hard to predict when such protests might occur. They could happen almost immediately after the election, or take a year or more to manifest. But with Thais so divided over what kind of political system is best for the country, Thailand’s protest cycles are likely to keep spinning with increasing frequency.