Duncan McCargo

When Thai voters went to the polls on May 14, they registered an unambiguous vote for change. The progressive Move Forward Party (MFP) emerged in first place, winning 151 seats in the 500-seat House of Representatives. Together with the strong showing of the Pheu Thai Party, the electoral vehicle of the popular exiled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the result was a decisive public rebuke of the military establishment that has ruled Thailand since the military coup of 2014.

However, the MFP and its leader, Pita Limjaroenrat, face numerous obstacles to forming Thailand’s next government. These include the power of the unelected Senate, which will vote to select the next prime minister later this month, and the ongoing Election Commission investigation into Pita’s eligibility to stand for office. 

Even if the MFP is allowed to take power, it faces an uphill battle in implementing its ambitious policy agenda. The past two decades offer numerous examples of how conservative forces have manipulated the legal system, and launched two coups d’etat, to remove governments that were perceived as threatening.

Duncan McCargo, a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen and the director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, was the author of a book about the Future Forward Party, the MFP’s predecessor, which performed well at the 2019 election before being disbanded by the courts on a technicality in early 2020. Late last month, he spoke with The Diplomat about the remarkable election result, what it says about recent changes in Thai politics, and some possible paths forward

In an article for Nikkei Asia immediately after the election, you wrote that you were skeptical about Pita Limjaroenrat’s confidence that his party would prevail, as were most observers of Thai politics. In retrospect, what do you think accounts for the Move Forward Party’s victory?

I talked to Pita in Udon Thani on April 17, and at that point the Pheu Thai landslide narrative was still really widespread. A combination of things happened during the final three weeks of the election that saw the tide turn. 

The broadly oppositional voter sentiment and popular desire to see an end to the rule of “the two uncles,” generals Prayut and Prawit, was growing stronger by the hour. So the choice was the MFP or PTP [Move Forward Party or Pheu Thai Party]. 

But Pheu Thai increasingly struggled to communicate effectively on two crucial fronts. First, who was their real prime ministerial candidate, Paetongtarn (Thaksin’s daughter) or Srettha? At a certain point, people became tired of Thaksin’s crass attempts to have it both ways by playing up Paetongtarn’s candidacy in the provincial heartlands, and offering up Srettha to the Bangkok middle classes. 

A second problem was the persistent rumor that Thaksin had already done a deal with Prawit, under which Pheu Thai would form a coalition government, probably fronted by one of the generals, and Thaksin would be allowed to return home from Dubai, with all the legal cases against him dropped. Pheu Thai never convincingly rebutted this idea, and indeed Thaksin tweeted on May 9, right before the election, that he would be home in time for his birthday on July 26. In the end a lot people decided voting for the MFP was the most surefire way to force the two uncles from office.

Another feature of the campaign was the extremely strong performance of Pita and other MFP-affiliated figures in the almost nightly TV debates between rival political parties. The MFP easily has the top debate team of any Thai party, and their speakers constantly attacked the two uncles and called for dramatic changes to the way Thailand was run. By comparison, leading politicians from the other parties appeared inarticulate, phony, or even downright idiotic. 

Very few people bothered to watch these debates in their entirety: What mattered was the short video clips they spawned, which were posted all over social media. The MFP perfected the art of crafting TV debate video-bites for mass consumption. During the final weeks of the election, the video-bite campaign grew more and more lively – and to the MFP’s advantage.

One of the most interesting things about the MFP’s performance was its near-complete victory in Bangkok, a traditional stronghold of royalist and pro-military parties, where it won in 32 of 33 constituencies. How do you explain this performance?

Actually, the MFP’s sweep of Bangkok was the least surprising outcome of the election from my perspective. Bangkok has its own political micro-climate, and voters there often swing overwhelmingly behind a single party, or a maverick oppositional candidate for city governor. 

The landslide election of the independent (but opposition-aligned) Chadchart Sittipunt to the Bangkok governorship last year was a clear indication of shifting sentiments in the capital. 

It’s true that Bangkokians voted strongly for the conservative Democrat Party in the 2007 and 2011 elections, but Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai took all bar five seats in the capital in 2005; while if we go back to March 1992, Chamlong Srimuang’s anti-corruption Palang Dharma Party won 32 out of 35 Bangkok constituencies. In short, Bangkok voters blow with the prevailing political winds, and 2023 was no exception.

The election result has also raised questions about the future of the Pheu Thai Party and the political movement associated with Thaksin Shinawatra, as the MFP stormed some of the party’s strongholds in the deep-red North. How did you interpret the party’s relatively underwhelming performance on May 14? Has the Thaksin wave crested?

See my answer to the first question above. The results showed that while Thaksin remains a very prominent political figure, he is no longer the main locus of opposition to military dominance, and instead looks more and more like part of the problem rather than part of the solution. He has failed to hand over control of his party to a new generation of politicians, persistently treating Pheu Thai like a football club that he owns and controls remotely from Dubai. 

In 2019 the party fielded two extremely strong prime ministerial candidates, Sudarat and Chadchart, but both of them have since been driven out of Pheu Thai by Thaksin’s antics. This time he fielded two far less credible prime minister candidates, neither of whom has any political experience – thereby demonstrating his inability to let go. While many diehard supporters remain loyal to Pheu Thai, the party has a declining appeal to new generation voters.

The MFP, like Future Forward before it, is the major Thai political party that can most claim some proximity to the student protest movement that staged a series of large public demonstrations in late 2020 and 2021. Some of the movement’s members have since joined the party. How would you describe the relationship between the MFP and the youth protest movement, and how do you think it could help (or hinder) the party as it undertakes the messy business of coalition building and, assuming it is able to garner the necessary votes, governing?

As you suggest, in many ways Move Forward may be termed a “movement party” with close ties to the youth-led protests that flared up from mid-2020. In the past, that kind of political branding as agitators – especially raising critical issues such as reform of the lese-majeste law – would have been electorally risky. But Thailand is changing, and it is clear that the MFP’s outspoken calls for the wholesale reform of state and society struck a chord with many voters, and not just younger ones. 

The MFP is now in the tricky position of having to live up to the radical expectations raised during the campaign, and negotiating with much more conservative prospective coalition partners. This is definitely not going to be easy, but ironically Pita and the other key figures in the MFP already proved the nay-sayers wrong: The more they talked about politically sensitive issues, the more public support they got. So don’t expect them to back down any time soon.

In a previous interview with The Diplomat, from November 2020, you said that while opposition forces might face short term setbacks, “if future generations of Thais feel no obligation to respect kings, generals, and other elderly men, it’s not a matter of whether or not the existing power structures start to give way: it’s just a question of when.” It is now similarly unclear whether the MFP’s victory will be circumscribed by conservative machinations of one sort or another. What do you think would happen if the courts or election commission sought to block or ban the MFP, as they did with Future Forward? Do you remain as confident about the inevitability of change in Thai politics?

I think the outcome of this election abundantly vindicates what I said in 2020. The establishment tried to crush the oppositional movement by banning Future Forward: the net results were unprecedented mass protests, followed by a doubling of Move Forward’s vote in the subsequent election. The old basis of political legitimacy – the shibboleth “Nation, Religion, King,” re-framed in an appeal to Cold War notions of nation-building – no longer works. 

Maybe the elites still don’t get it, but the Thai population is moving on rapidly to new understandings of politics. So I am still confident about the inevitability of change. I think the reaction of Thai voters to possible attempts to block the MFP’s path to power are rather hard to predict, but certainly any such moves would generate a significant backlash.