Can Thailand Move Forward? - Transcript

Opening jingle [00:00:02]

This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

Petra Alderman [00:00:09]

Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. I’m Petra Alderman, an associate researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen and a postdoctoral research fellow at the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham. In this episode, I am joined by Duncan McCargo, NIAS director and professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen, and Ken Lohatepanont, a PhD student at the University of Michigan. Welcome to the podcast, Duncan and Ken.

Duncan McCargo [00:00:42]

Thank you.

Ken Lohatepanont [00:00:43]

Thank you for having me.

Petra Alderman [00:00:45]

It's absolutely a great pleasure to have you on the podcast today and I'm super excited about talking to you about the 2023 Thai election that happened on the 14th of May. I know that both of you were in Thailand during this time and so was I, and it was an absolutely exciting period. But before we delve deep into the results and what this might mean for Thai politics, I would like to ask you about the pre-election period. I mean, already in the run up to the election, there was a discussion about this election being a historic one. And I would like to get your thoughts on why do you think it was such a historic poll? I mean, it was the second election after the 2014 military coup, not the first one. So what made this a historic poll in your eyes? Ken.

Ken Lohatepanont [00:01:29]

For me, I think that although, as you say, it was it was a second election after the military coup. So in a sense, it wasn't like a return to democracy. There hasn't really been a change in the rules or really a return to full blown democracy that we might expect. But it still felt historic in the sense that we could see that we had a new progressive party move forward that had contested in 2019, but this time had clearly gained strength and was able to compete and go toe to toe with the much more established Thai party which had won every single general election since 2001 than their predecessors. And so the fact that move forward was able to compete and contest this poll with new established parties, I think really made this election feel quite different, even more different than when Future Forward first entered the fray. And I would also say the other dimension of this election was the fact that there was a lot more uncertainty about what the coalition outcome might look like. The fact that we had all these rumors about cross camp deals possibly between Pheu Thai and Palang Pracharat meant that there was simply a lot more guesswork that had to be made about what kind of result we're going to see emerge from the election in a way that wasn't the case in 2019, when it was quite clear which parties were going to team up with which parties after the election.

Petra Alderman [00:02:51]

Yeah, that's very true. And Duncan, you co-authored a book on the Future Forward Party and the Rise of It back in 2019. So how historic did you think this election was going to be and what were your thoughts on the run up to the polls?

Duncan McCargo

I think for those people who closely followed the 2019 election, which certainly includes the two of us Petra, there was almost a sense of inevitability about what was going to happen. It really seemed like the generals were intent on retaining power and they were going to do so by any manner or means. And even though Pheu Thai did quite well electorally, you just had this feeling that we knew what was going to happen. And this time we didn't really know what was going to happen. It all seemed up for grabs. What was very clear was that the opposition parties were making all the running from the beginning and the feeling that you got from talking to people, the length and breadth of Thailand, that we don't want the uncles anymore. If I had 100 baht for everybody, you told me we're bored of the uncles would be quite a rich man after visiting 11 provinces in Thailand. I mean, so many people, even people who were actually quite conservative and quite sympathetic to some of the parties that had been aligned with the government were telling me, we can't do these uncles anymore. So that was, I think, what made this election so exciting. There's a feeling that the uncles just have to go. But how can that possibly happen? Because we know that the political elite has got all kinds of tricks that as as Ken was saying, all these rumors about deals, we know the uncles are not going to want to relinquish power. So how can this actually be done? What's the mechanism by which the uncles can be displaced? I think that's what made it historic. It was that sense, which is a sense in the wake of the dissolution of Future Forward. As I always say on my birthday, the 21st of February 2020, at the protest that followed that the feeling that after the protests in August 2010 and the issues about monarchical reform being raised, there was kind of no going back to where Thailand was before. We can draw a line in Thailand before the 10th of August 2020 and Thailand after. So this is the first election after the 10th of August 2020, when Rung stood on the stage at Thammasat Rangsit and talked about the need to reform the monarchy. So that's in a sense why Thailand is a different political place from the place that it was in 2019. We had moved on from people kind of accepting the rules of the game where there are things you just don't talk about and things you just can't do to. No. It's all out there. We're going to get a whole load of student activists and protest leaders and put them on our party slate and see if they can win election. We're going to talk about reforming one one, two. We're going to talk about all all the sacred cows shall be brought out into the field. And we're going to talk about these sacred cows. So that was the sense of excitement around the election, whether it was the Pheu Thai landslide discourse or the Move Forward is on the march discourse, all this energy from the oppositional side. And yet in the back of our minds, how on earth are they going to pull this off, given all the levers of power that the conservative parties and the establishment continue to hold within their grasp? So that's, I guess, a long winded way of saying that's what makes it historic. And it's of course, it's still going on. We're not finished with this process yet. We're still at the edge of our seats. You know, we had the election results in for quite a while now. We still don't know what the result of the election actually is.

Petra Alderman [00:06:03]

Exactly. And we'll get to that very shortly. But what I really find interesting and as you rightly said, Duncan, Thailand was really a different place and it felt very different to what it felt back in 2019. But one of the things that Ken was also saying, which I thought was quite important, was the fragmentation of the conservative camp, and that was a big thing. So Duncan, you mentioned the two uncles, so General Prayut and General Prawit, who were both behind the 2014 coup and back in 2019, both were pulling at one end. Prawit was basically the head of the Palang Pracharat party and Prayut was the nominee for the PM seat by that very party. But this time there was a split between these two generals. Prior to election, Prawit continued with the Palang Pracharat party. He became the PM candidate for Palang Pracharat party, whereas Prayut left and joined United Thai Nations Party and other super conservative party, and he was nominated by that party for a PM seat. So these two generals effectively were competing against each other and that was quite a big thing. I mean, what do you make of this, Ken?

Ken Lohatepanont [00:07:07]

So I think that there was always a question in many people's minds about whether or not this was a real rift, right? Whether or not Prayut and Prawit were actually in conflict with each other or if there was some sort of electoral strategy going on. And I've always leaned towards the hypothesis that it's real. There's real discord between the two, because in this electoral system where that favored larger parties, it made no sense really for the two generals to split instead of combining forces. And I think that although Pheu Thai strongly denied any claim that they were looking to make a deal with General Prawit, I would point to a number of data points to suggest that both sides were at least amenable to some form of cooperation. For example, Prawit was spared by Pheu Thai to the no confidence debates. Captain Thamanat, who who is Prawit’s right hand man, cooperated with Pheu Thai to try to topple Prayut, although that failed. And then Prawit and Pheu Thai later also voted together to amend the Constitution and reintroduce the two-ballot system. And so my take on this is that Pheu Thai working with General Prayut is not something that's conceivable, Prayut is much more of an ideological conservative than Prawit. Prawit’s much more pragmatic. He's much more open to making a deal of the sort that would allow him to retain power in some form. While Prayut, you clearly can't work with Thaksin, with Pheu Thai. And so I think that there's a lot of evidence to suggest that this rift was very much real and that they in the end were both harmed by it. They didn't they both didn't perform as well as they would have if they had joined forces.

Petra Alderman [00:08:39]

Yeah. Duncan. I mean, we both attended the rallies of these parties, both the Palang Pracharat party and the United Thai Nations. The atmosphere at the rallies was also very different. Maybe you can say something to us that because I thought that was quite something to experience.

Duncan McCargo

It was, yes. So just to be clear, we went to the very final rallies that were held in Bangkok on the Friday the 12th, the last sort of full day of election campaigning, and saw both of the uncles in action. And quite an interesting spectacle this was. What was extremely clear as soon as we got to the United Thai Nation party event at the Queen Sirikit Center, I mean, this was just a very, very different vibe from the Palang Pracharat vibe. The Palang Pracharat vibe was people kind of along for the ride, as you tend to see at lots of party political rallies. The woman in front of us we were chatting to while we were waiting to go through security actually confessed to us that she was about to attend the Move Forward rally that was being held at the stadium next door as soon as this one finished, and she had in her bag an orange T-shirt. So she was wearing a Palang Pracharat T-shirt that she planned to take off very shortly. Now, she may have been an exceptional case. I don't think we can generalize from that one point. But the fact was that whilst there was energy and enthusiasm in the room, it was very, very dramatically less. And as soon as I got to Ruam Thai Sang Chart, it was just flashback time. This is the PDRC, these are the protesters from 2013-14. I almost recognize them and their enthusiasm for General Prayut in particular and for the very, very conservative messages of the United Thai Nation party was absolutely palpable. So you saw a split between a party that really is very genuinely ideological, as Ken says, and articulates this. I mean, just just from the name as heard Chris Baker talking about on another podcast the other day, Ruam Thai Sang Chart, you know, “get together to build the Thai nation”. This is absolutely the language of the Cold War. Whereas Palang Pracharat had positioned themselves as being a pragmatic party with a focus on trying to reduce conflict, and the implication being that it was the kind of compromise figure who could calm things down and find a way to get everybody working together, which of course can easily be code for for doing a dodgy deal to get some very unlikely characters into government together, which I guess was what was really being hinted at the whole time. And what was interesting was that during the course of the election, this narrative was increasingly rumbled. Of course, helped in the beginning by Jatuporn, the former Red Shirt leader, basically giving a number of YouTube interviews explaining that Thaksin and Prawit were already in bed together, which framed the understandings of many of us about what might or might not be going on. So that was a very interesting situation, the split between the two parties. Of course, another factor in this was Prayut’s suspension from being prime minister for a period of time last year by the Constitutional Court and the ruling that he could only be prime minister for another two years. Now, since two years from now, the Senate will no longer, unless things change, have a vote on who gets to be prime minister. It wouldn't be the wisest of ideas to put General Prayut up to be Prime minister just for two years knowing, that you are going to lose control over the process of who replaces him. So you could see immediately the case for Prawit and what Palang Pracharat was all about. But absolutely, there's nothing fake about this. It wasn't in their electoral interests. The point is, only one person can be prime minister. And both of these two uncles would like to be prime minister. And that was extremely obvious by the end of the election campaign, if it was not obvious before.

Petra Alderman [00:12:28]

Indeed. And the rallies were testimony to that. We could see them. They both acted a lot more politician-like than they used to before, especially in the case of Prayut - he really grew into that political role. Back in 2019, he wasn't very active when it came to campaigning. He only attended the final rally in Bangkok, which was the closing rally back then for the Palang Pracharat party. But this time he was a lot more active in these campaigns. So it was very interesting to see that evolution of him from a really ardent military general to a more political type figure in the run up to the 2023 election. Okay. Well, if we look at the election results now, which is really the stuff that we are all very interested in and the post-election analysis. I mean, probably all of us were at the edge of our seats on the election night looking as the results were coming in, and constituency after constituency, seat after seat was turning orange. It was Move Forward party. So the party did extremely well. The election commission has 60 days to certify the results and they've just basically announced that they're going to do a recount in several constituencies. So what we know now can still change. But so far from the results, it is clear that Thai people have voted for the Move Forward party and the party won the most constituency seats so far and the most partyless seats so far. Was this a surprise outcome for you? And how do you how do you assess this, Duncan?

Duncan McCargo

Yeah. I mean, I think everybody was surprised by the size of Move Forward’s success in this election. The big question for many of us had been all along, is it going to be possible for Move Forward to repeat the kind of success that Future Forward had, given that, you know, Thanathorn had this incredible personal following last time. There was this whole sort of Korean boyband pop star thing around him with the Fah Rak Pho, which was not going to be replicated. Last time, Future Forward had the value of novelty. You know, everybody loves something new. People in Thailand, particularly love new parties. But to get the second election is often quite challenging for new parties in Thailand as it is in other parts of the world. So could they really pull it off again, was the question. And many people were assuming that if they could get the 81 seats again or if they could get a little bit more than that, that would already be a spectacular performance. Now, I talked to Pita briefly in Udon Thani on the 17th of April and I said, how's it going? And he said, Oh, you know, what you've got to understand is the landslide is ours. It's not the Pheu Thai landslide. We are going to have the landslide. At that point, though, he blew it by saying we're going to get more than 200 seats and didn't believe him. So I kind of discounted what he said, but I should have listened more carefully. He said, we've got all this really good internal polling showing that we're doing amazingly well in places that you wouldn't imagine. And that obviously was true. It's really, really interesting. And it's particularly interesting in places like Buri Ram, which I also visited, where, okay, Bhumjaithai dominates Buri Ram and they won all the constituency seats but Move Forward won the party list vote in Buri Ram. What?! I mean, these kind of results are really, really quite extraordinary places where you would not expect the orange wave to reach its actually reached, particularly in terms of the party list. And I think the thing that made predicting this election so difficult was the return to the two-ballot system and the staggering number of people, I just ran across them everywhere, who said, I'm going to vote for this local candidate, but I'm going to give my party list vote to Move Forward. There are a lot of Pheu Thai people saying; I'll vote for the Pheu Thai candidate, but the party… you know, who's their really their prime minister? What's going on here? I think give the party one to Move Forward. But the interesting thing was the people who were supporting conservative parties or Bhumjaithai and then decided to give their vote to Move Forward. Even the candidates from other parties who told me that they really thought Move Forward was great or that Pita was great or that they would vote for him if they had a chance. Even party candidates who told me they hadn't voted for themselves last time, they voted for Future Forward. So there is this strange underlying support for Move Forward that doesn't fit into ready classification and is very difficult to predict and anticipate.

Petra Alderman [00:16:39]

Especially if we think about the 2019 election and the Future Forward. As you said back then, the electoral rules were different, so there was a single ballot and the party actually did quite well in terms of partyless seats, and that was really held by the proportional formula that was used back in 2019. And that has changed. So in some ways it was expected this time around that it would be even more difficult for a party like Move Forward to win partyless seats and constituency seats. Everybody kind of felt, well, this is going to be a tough, tough battle for Move Forward because as we know in Thailand, in a lot of the provinces, there is this Bhamiya, big local power networks that really have control over these areas. So what do you make of this, Ken? How was move forward able to break through some of these established local power networks in the provinces?

Ken Lohatepanont

So I think that this speaks a lot to the declining value of money politics and patronage politics in the local provinces. I mean, I would point to, you know, Professor McCargo’s own work on urbanised villagers and how we're seeing a lot more convergence between urban voters and rural voters in ways that we haven't seen before. And I remember in the lead up to the election I was talking to an MP from one of the coalition parties, one of the government parties, and he said something to the effect of “this wouldn't be before it's victory, but in four years they're going to be scary”. And in the end, you know, he was wrong. In the end, this election, Move Forward actually did manage to break through, you know, the whole web of patronage and of pork barrel politics, born with, you know, ideological principles. But I, I do think that when we talk about Move Forward’s victory, it does obscure a little bit about the nature of the victory. They won with about 14 million votes about in a party list, which makes up for about 30% of the total vote share. In the past, the Democrats won about a couple of percentage points lower than that, and they were absolutely swept by Pheu Thai. The Democrats didn't come anywhere close to victory. The fact that Move Forward benefited from the fragmentation of the political landscape that's underground meant that they were able to win with a plurality vote. But I think that it also shows that it wasn't really a landslide, so to speak, more of a hesitant endorsement from the Thai people. A lot of people still voted for Pheu Thai, which obviously has a much more conservative style of campaigning and policy making than Move Forward. And so in the end, yes, we should take into account Move Forward’s victory and the new style of politics that's been breaking through, but at the same time, I wouldn't totally discount Thailand's traditional style of politics and older political values quite yet.

Petra Alderman [00:19:15]

Yeah. So you would probably say that we can't really expect that this is the end of money politics in Thailand and this is the end of voter buying and all these older practices. I think what you said there was very interesting and very important actually in terms of the magnitude of the win. It was a massive thing. Obviously, everybody was surprised. But I think what we have to remember and you were right in pointing this out, that Pheu Thai actually came close second and what we know in terms of the actual results as they stand now, there was only a ten see difference between the two parties. So it was not a safe margin by which Move Forward won the election. And I think that's causing them a lot of problems now in the post-election period. So, Duncan, what are your views? I mean, do you think we will be actually able to see a Move Forward-led coalition government in power with Pita becoming prime minister? This is the million dollar question right now.

Duncan McCargo

Yes. And anybody, anybody who can make confident predictions about Thai politics these days is very, very brave. So I've always been extremely cautious about making those predictions. Yeah, I'm wary of trying to predict anything under these circumstances. It's fairly clear that the elites, the Network Monarchy, whatever you want to call them, they're playing for time, right? So they're stalling for time. So of course, we could have had the election results by now and we haven't got the election results. And now we have this thing of let's just do some recount and some reruns, and lots of people will feel that that is a little bit disconcerting because it's taken them a while to decide that they need to do these reruns. And of course, yeah, you'd only have to shift the number of seats fairly marginally for Pheu Thai suddenly to overtake Move Forward and then get us into a very different political terrain. So that's one of the questions. Then, of course, there's the Pita disqualification case, which is just so eerily reminiscent of the Thanathorn disqualification case. And then we start to hear, you know, talk about rerunning the whole election or not having a prime minister until May of next year. You know, this is very like Cambodia when I was living there in the early 2000s, when it took almost a year to form a government after one of the elections because the wrong result was produced and a lot of negotiation had to take place behind the scenes. So I'm quite sure that whilst Pita and Move Forward will be doing a great job of performing the government to be with their rallies and their dinners and so wearing ties and going around and talking to all kinds of important people, acting like the future Prime Minister, at the moment this has to be seen as performative rather than a substantive. There's still a great deal to play for, and there are many, many different things that could happen before Pita Limjaroenrat is actually proclaimed Prime Minister. And not least, there's of course something we haven't mentioned yet. I alluded to it in the context of Prayut’s situation, but the Senate vote, are these senators really going to vote along the lines that the public sentiment might suggest they ought to vote? So, yeah, lots and lots of difficult questions here.

Petra Alderman [00:22:07]

Exactly. I mean, there's been a lot of talk before the elections when I've been talking to people, asking them about, you know, the big elephant in the room, i.e., the Senate and their ability to actually join the vote for prime minister. And I was asking people, well, what if the wrong party wins? Do you think that they will vote and listen to the people's will? And everybody's saying, well, you know, if it’s a landslide, they will have to do that. But at the moment, it doesn't really seem to be the case. I mean, the Move Forward party has been trying to put quite a lot of pressure on the senators publicly since the vote and really try to say, look, people have voted. It's a landslide for the opposition parties. You have to support the people's vote. Ken, so far I think Move Forward has been only able to maybe secure potentially 20 odd senators who said that they might vote alongside of the people. I mean, how realistic do you think that Senate would throw its support behind, Move Forward and behind Pita, in this case?

Ken Lohatepanont [00:23:01]

I do think that Pita's path to getting to 376 votes remaines very complicated. As you said, you know, the Senate at this point, there's still most of them are still silent about what they're going to do. But as you said, only about 20, give or take, Senators have said that they're willing to vote for Pita. I do think one of the issues is that, as I alluded to earlier, Move Forward still remains very much a party outside the political mainstream, especially with their stance on, xxx. And it remains a radioactive issue for conservatives and even for Pheu Thai as well. The other Coalition parties, you know, pressured Move Forward to take it out of their coalition, MOU in the hopes of making the Coalition more acceptable to others. And as I said earlier, I think the fact that Move Forward only won 151 seats means that they don't have sufficient pressure, especially when compared to the second biggest party Pheu Thai who have 141 seats. They simply don't have enough power to try to push to try and make the case that they have to be government and that it's only done with the democratic right. I think that the other issue that they're facing right now is that they've also maxed out the support that they can get from the lower house. They tried to bring in Chart Pattana Kla, which I think it probably is a conservative party, but much less conservative than, say, the United Thai Nation party. But in the end, they gave in to pressure from their voter base online and threw them back out of the coalition. And so I think that, having seen that, there are probably no other parties that they can convince to try to vote for them unless the other Conservative Party vote for them out of democratic principle or whatever, which, you know, if I were Pita I wouldn't want to try to depend on the mercy of people from across the political aisle to try to become prime minister.

Petra Alderman [00:24:47]

Exactly. And I think there is a lot of pragmatism going around the Thai political scene. And I think parties that are not part of this, Pita or Move Forward, like the government will think, well, why should we support you when we are not part of the government and we're not going to get anything out of it? So I think there is also that level of pragmatism that he will have to face. But I remember talking to you, Duncan, before elections, and we were discussing that although Move Forward and Pheu Thai are often sort of bunched together as these Democratic parties or, you know, on the Democratic side of Thai politics, they are not the most natural allies. So what do you make of this? It seems still like a very uncomfortable alliance.

Duncan McCargo [00:25:25]

Right? Yeah. I mean, us political scientists or commentators, our job is to simplify things and make things nice and clear. Some people have been talking about distinctions that would seem to make sense. However, just as Ken was saying that what would push the argument even further, the distinction between the countryside and the city has completely collapsed in Thailand. And those of us who grew up with Anathla Thammatat the tale of two democracies really just have to throw the whole thing out the window because the urban has become the rural and the rural has become the urban. By the same token, I think the distinction between these conservative parties and these oppositional parties has become extremely problematic. I think this one opposition party, Move Forward and I think the other parties are all implicitly willing to join the government. I mean Prachachart, which is currently playing a brokerage role amongst the potential coalition partners, they were quite up for joining the government after 2019 and you know exactly why they didn't is a little bit murky. Probably a signal from the man in Dubai. So it's not like there's real hardcore oppositionism in parties like Pheu Thai and one of the big tensions, of course, that broke out very early on and we talk about this in the Future Forward book is when Thanathorn started looking into the budgets, what do the Budget Committee do? It dishes out money to all the different political parties with various kinds of side projects and so forth that are written into government budgets and opposition parties, including Pheu Thai and major beneficiaries of this existing order. So just because you're, “in opposition” doesn't mean you're not getting very substantial benefits from what you do in Parliament. And when Thanathorn and Future forward came along and said, we're going to blow this wide open, we're going to expose how this system works, they got really, really bad backlash from the other, “opposition parties” who were trying to tell them, look, it just doesn't work like this. You can't start criticizing all this stuff. This is where we get our money from. This is our bread and butter. So there is this sense in which Move Forward, like Future Forward has been a thorn in the side of other, “opposition parties” like Pheu Thai. And this is why a deal between a Pheu Thai and Palang Pracharat makes a lot of sense. These parties aren't nearly as different as people might want to assume. They're different in certain respects in terms of their history and their self-presentation and their rhetoric. But deep down, the political economy that underpins these parties is very similar.

Petra Alderman [00:27:50]

Yeah, and there's been rumors about this kind of deal 2.0 potentially that Prawit might actually dissolve the Palang Pracharat party so that he allows all his MPs and party listers who won in the election to join Pheu Thai and therefore strengthen the ranks of Pheu Thai, making it the party with the most seats, so that Pheu Thai then can go and lead the government in that way. So, I mean, do you think that's still a realistic scenario? Is that still potentially on the cards, Ken?

Ken Lohatepanont [00:28:19]

I know that Palang Pracharat has publicly denied the specific rumor that they were going to dissolve the party. But again, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if in the end a Pheu Thai and Palang Pracharat partnership of some sort came to materialise. And the reason being, as Professor McCargo was saying, these two parties aren't really all that different. In fact, a lot of the people who are currently in Palang Pracharat used to be in Pheu Thai. They were brought in in 2019, but they wouldn't be entirely opposed to going back home, so to speak. And if this were any other country, I would actually maybe suggest that Pheu Thai could perhaps be classified really as a conservative party, not really a liberal party in any way. The fact that they're not considered a conservative party here in Thailand is due to the nature of the political system that forces them to be in opposition. But they're not really ideologically or politically different from Palang Pracharat at all.

Petra Alderman [00:29:14]

And I think that's a very important point as well in terms of the whole spectrum of Thai politics. I mean, there's been obviously a lot of talk, especially, I think, heightened by the 2014 coup and then the election in 2019, which was really represented by, you know, pro-military, anti-military camp. And the anti-military camp was automatically labeled as democratic in many ways. And that camp contained Pheu Thai and Future Forward. But as we are saying here and also when looking at the policies, pre-elections, the differences between the various different parties who are not that stark take out Move Forward with some of the more radical ideas and you have a political pool of parties that look very similar. If you took out the logos, if you took out the party names, you probably wouldn't really be able to say which policy belong to which party in many instances, especially when it came to the economic offerings. If we for a moment stop talking about the Move Forward party, the victory and what's going to happen next. Have there been any particular surprises in this election for you outside of the Move Forward victory, Ken?

Ken Lohatepanont [00:30:15]

Not entirely a surprise per se, but I think I would comment a little bit on the performance of the Democratic Party. It used to be the main vehicle of choice for conservatives up until 2019 when they suffered a big defeat and got reduced about 50 seats. And now this time around, party leaders are saying their secretary general saying he would quit if the party got less than 50 seats and they only got 25. They were decimated in the south. They won back no seats in Bangkok. Again, none of this is entirely super surprising. But I still think that the scale of the climb from really what used to be one of the two main parties in what was essentially a two-party system for 10-15 years, it's still striking that they've lost so much ground to Prayut. They can't perform as well on the constituency ballot as Prawit and I think that that party has a lot of self-reflection to do.

Petra Alderman [00:31:07]

Yeah, that's for sure. And I remember as well seeing some of the local results for Bangkok this time around. The constituencies in 2019 that used to be Democrat constituencies before were turned around and became Palang Pracharat then. But all these constituencies, or many of them, you know, this time around, just went to Move Forward. So, Duncan, what were the other surprises for you in the election if any at all?

Duncan McCargo

Well, it was an election full of surprises. I guess we can also talk about the second party in that putative two-party system, Pheu Thai itself, what really happened to Pheu Thai? Because I arrived in Thailand at the beginning of April believing, like most people, that this landslide was on the way. There was all this talk of it and everywhere the Move Forward people were quite demoralized. The first 3 or 4 provinces I went to because they just said, you know, Pheu Thai’s on such a roll, we're really going to be struggling with them. They've got all this money, there's all this excitement around it. So it wasn't just that Move Forward leapt forward as it were, but that Pheu Thai somehow was unravelling. And the of course, they ended up with a similar number of seats, the number of seats they got in 2019 in a way. So you can say, you know, it wasn't that “surprising”, but considering that we had had all this expectation about Pheu Thai performing outstandingly well, there was an element of surprise here. And I was sort of shocked by the degree to which the whole Pheu Thai story began to unravel. Part of it was the the ludicrous number of prime ministerial candidates, like why do we have three of them to begin with? And then how can you continue to play this game of telling all the people in Isan you're going to have Un In as the prime minister and telling all the middle classes in Bangkok it's going to be Srettha? I mean, this thing just got sillier and sillier as time went on when they couldn't really commit to who their prime minister candidate was. And that made them look so idiotic compared to Move Forward, who were quite clear about their candidate. And then Thaksin's going to come back saying on the 9th of May, tweeting that he's coming back for his birthday, which as we know is the 26th of July. This kind of ongoing stuff really didn't help them with their messaging. So a number of things were happening with Pheu Thai that were a bit surprising. And somehow it's not just that Move Forward did very well, but they're doing well as to a large extent to do with Pheu Thai blowing it. They did issue these half-baked, incoherent and inconsistent denials about the putative deal with Prawit, but they never seemed very convincing and they never seemed to be on message. And the fact that you've got a party leader who no one takes seriously, three prime ministerial candidates, one of whom we didn't see at all, and the other two of whom were not always in sync with everything. And a de facto leader in Dubai, you know, who was going to answer our questions about what Pheu Thai is all about. But all these different rival-would-be-supposed leaders. And compared to other parties, it started to look very messy and they look very messy compared to Bhumjaithai as well. And even to the the pro-military parties, it was much less clear what they were doing than it should have been. This has been, as Ken said, the electoral juggernaut of modern Thai politics. Prior to this, they “won”, even though they were cheated out of it in 2019. But they “won” every election from 2001 to 2019, including the 2 in 2006 and 2014 that were annulled. What has happened to Pheu Thai? Thaksin seems to have lost the plot. Can they come back? I don't know whether they can come back in the way that they were before because the whole shtick about Pheu Thai is they're unbeatable. They're this juggernaut. They're going to mow you out of the way. Well, all bets are off now, but I'd love to know what Ken thinks about the Pheu Thai question, actually.

Ken Lohantepanont

On one hand, it's surprising that Pheu Thai did so badly compared to expectations. But on the other hand, in retrospect, I think that I don't want to use the word expiration date, but whose time for decline has come? They've dominated Thailand for two decades now, which is essentially unheard of in politics, in Thailand, at least where a party would be so dominant electorally for so long. And the truth of the matter is, I think their playbook has now been stolen by all the other parties. If you're in Thailand in the lead up to the campaign and you saw the campaign posters, you could barely read anything because it was just all big numbers that were screaming at you. And I remember driving past and I couldn't even make out what the policies were. But everybody had copied Thaksin’s playbook of, you know, of advertising all these policies. Pheu Thai tried to play up the trump card with their 10,000 baht, digital money for every person above the age of 16 that can be used in a four kilometer radius. And any of that just sound, A, too complicated and B is just too good to be true. People didn't think that Thailand had the fiscal power to actually get a policy like that approved without harming essentially any other program that needs money in Thailand. And I think that Pheu Thai in the end, they just exhausted the ammunition. On the question of the three prime minister candidates, I agree with Professor McCargo that it is just led to a lack of clarity. People never seem to really be quite sure whether they're going to get a Paetongtarn Shinawatra premiership or a Srettha Thavisin premiership, and yeah, we didn't get to see Chaikasem on the campaign train at all, basically. But I would also add that I think that Move Forward must now be quite regretful of the fact that they only nominated Pita for prime Minister, because Thaksin did say in a talk after the election that he's been in politics for a long time. He knows that in Thailand anything can happen. He needs backups and now, Move Forward having nominated only Pita, perhaps because they didn't expect to be in a position to nominate a prime minister in the first place anyway. But having nominated only one candidate who now risks being disqualified, they have no fallback option and I think that's going to come back and bite them.

Petra Alderman [00:36:55]

Yeah, that's a very good point. And I think we've been talking about this and there is one theme sort of emerging out, and this will be my final question. But, you know, we've been discussing these topics as academics in Thai politics for quite a while. But is it about people or is it about policy when you boil it down in the electoral trends? And I think this has been a big question, obviously, in regard to Move Forward party that has proposed 300 policies in the run up to the election and as you mentioned, with Thaksin and all the other parties now kind of copying the Thaksin style policy offerings, are we seeing Thailand moving even further towards the sort of personalistic politics or where are we standing after the 2023 poll, Ken?

Ken Lohatepanont [00:37:35]

I think that you could probably look at this in two main ways. One, do you see a clear shift to more programmatic appeals from political parties. The other parties were copying Thaksin’s playbook. The fact that they were now competing on policy I think is still a positive sign and shows, you know, some sort of assuring of Thailand's party system. But on the other hand, the fact remains that Move Forward differentiated themselves with a message of change their needs to democratize, to demilitarize, to de-monopolize Thailand. This was clearly something that touched a chord with the Thai electorate. And in the end, I think that it's definitely a shift from personality based politics, but at the same time, I think this election, as policy driven as it might have felt, was also personality based in the sense that, as Professor McCargo alluded to earlier, a lot of this was about rejecting Prayut and Prawit, the two uncles. It was about, you know, Prayut, we don't want Prayut anymore. We've had him for eight years. He doesn't have charisma. You know, he's so macure and arrogant. All these things are things that I heard on the campaign trail. To say that people rejected Prayut just based on his policies alone, I think would not be accurate. It was also a personality-based rejection.

Petra Alderman [00:38:53]

And obviously, parties have been pushing on personality as well with Move Forward, obviously being led by Pita. And then we've got Pheu Thai nominating Thaksin's daughter as one of the PM candidates. So, Duncan, what do you make of this personality versus policy debate?

Duncan McCargo

It is tricky. I've always been highly skeptical that policies have a great deal to do with winning elections in Thailand. And yes, it's possible to identify particular policies and associate them with parties up to a point. I mean, Move Forward as the classic one here, because they perform the best in this election. I think people had a feeling about the party, as Ken says, that it was an oppositional party that stood for certain things, you don't actually need the laundry list of 300 policies. It's what kind of Thailand do you want? It's one that's not like the one, you know, it won't be like before. That was what mattered is this. I really didn't like that slogan when I first read it because it was so ridiculously vague. But somehow it captured a certain zeitgeist for people that they just they wanted change. They didn't want Thailand to go on as it was before, and that's what they were voting for. It wasn't anything in the list of 300 specific policies. And I think the same applied to people voting for Pheu Thai because they still have this residual faith in Thaksin and the fact that they did so well economically in in those governments in the first few years of the new millennium. And there's a kind of nostalgia for that. That's what they were voting for. And in a sense, a lot of people said, we don't care which of these three is Prime Minister. The only thing is we know that Pheu Thai will have our backs when it comes to the economy. And the economy is the biggest priority for us right now. Same thing, you know, with the conservative parties. People voted for them because they had a particular idea of what they wanted Thailand to be. There are some people who may like Prayut’s personality, but they're a minority and don't think they're even all of the people who like Ruam Thai Sang Chart, Prawit doesn't have any very discernible personality that is sort of saleable politically. Yet his party still managed to get quite a few seats. Same with Anutin, who’s certainly not a popular personality, but Bhumjaithai got a substantial tranche of seats and we haven't talked about them perhaps enough in this conversation. So people voted for parties because they had ideas about them which were tied up with certain kind of slogans. Yes, the personalities of the leaders are somewhere in there. But I believe and I'm not just talking about Thailand, but all over the place, having seen Trump elected in the US when I was living there and the Brexit vote in the UK, people are voting based on emotion and think this was absolutely an emotional election. We’re bored of - we hate the uncles, we want change. We love Pita because he's young and fresh. We still have this incredibly warm feeling towards Thaksin because he helped us out so much in the past. These kind of emotions were what were driving people's electoral decisions very often. They're not easily captured in that personality versus policy dichotomy, although we can't rule that out.

Petra Alderman [00:41:43]

So would you agree with the fact, Ken, that this was the the election of the emotions in 2023, then, as Duncan has said?

Ken Lohatepanont [00:41:51]

Yes, I would certainly agree with the sentiment that this is a desire to repudiate military rule, a desire to reject, you know, the three Ps, the so-called triumvirate of Prayut, Prawit and Palang Pracharat that had ruled Thailand since 2014 and above any specific policy, this was what was driving the vote. But it's also points to the perhaps effectiveness of Move Forward’s voter base. Emotions change very quickly. If move forward does form a government, they're no longer get to play the role of the pure opposition party that have gone to play for the past four years. Already we are seeing, you know, when Move Forward makes unpopular decisions, their voter base is not gentle or kind to them and how they're going to survive the next couple of years now that they're in government and have to make real decisions and make real compromises, I think that very much remains to be seen whether or not this emotionally driven decision will favour them in the long run.

Petra Alderman [00:42:47]

Yeah. And I think that was a very good point to sort of finish it on. I mean, we don't know what's going to happen yet, but even if the Move Forward-led coalition actually gets to the point of being able to be in power and be in government, and if Pita becomes the next prime minister, they are still facing huge obstacles like the 2017 military drafted constitution. If they cannot change that, what will happen then? You know, their hands will be very tied. And as you say, the electorate might not be too kind to them because I think expectations on that party are immense for the party to really change the face of Thai politics. And if they do not deliver, as you said, the electorate may not be willing to be like, Oh, well, that's okay, we'll give you another chance. Maybe this is the only chance the party will ever get. On that note, unfortunately, we have run out of time. We could probably talk for much longer, but it's been an absolute pleasure having you both here. So thank you very much, Duncan and Ken, for joining today and for joining the Nordic Asia podcast and talking to me about the excitements of the 2023 Thai elections. Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia. I’m Petra Alderman, associate researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen and a postdoctoral research fellow at the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham. I've been talking today to Duncan McCargo, NIAS director and professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen, and Ken Lohatepanont on a PhD student at the University of Michigan. Thank you.

Duncan McCargo [00:44:19]

Thank you.

Ken Lohatepanont [00:44:21]

Thank you.

Closing Jingle [00:44:24]

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