Legacy of 2014 coup haunts Thai reformist’s bid for PM

Gone, maybe, but not soon forgotten. As Pita Limjaroenrat, the 42-year-old Harvard graduate who won Thailand’s general election, leaned back in his black leather chair as vote after vote was counted Thursday at a joint session of parliament, did he feel, for a moment, his predecessor’s shadow standing over him? Before the final result was declared, it was already clear – Pita had not won the support he needed to follow former commander-in-chief Prayuth Chan-ocha as prime minister. 

Photographed in varying stages of frustration throughout the vote, the winner of the May 2023 polls needed 375 votes in both houses of parliament, the house of representatives and the senate, to become prime minister. He got 324. Across both houses, 182 lawmakers voted against his candidacy, with 199 abstaining.

A disappointing result for the reformist candidate, but not a surprising one. Under the military-drafted constitution promulgated in 2017, all 250 members of the senate – now 249, following an eleventh-hour resignation the day before – were appointed by the junta that seized power under then-army chief Prayuth in 2014. 

Only 13 of these senators supported Pita’s candidacy, with 34 voting against him. A further 159 senators abstained. Dozens more did not show up to the vote.

Thursday’s setback may mark the beginning of the end for the liberal frontrunner. On Saturday, Pita announced that if he failed again in a second ballot set for next week, he would withdraw his candidacy for the premiership.

Although he announced his retirement from politics just two days before the vote, caretaker Prime Minister Prayuth’s nine years in power cast a suffocating shadow over Thursday’s ballot. The arch-royalist seized power in part to ensure the smooth succession of unpopular crown prince Maha Vajiralongkorn as his father’s health continued to decline. The former army chief then spent years writing the long-standing alliance between the military and the monarchy into the nation’s highest laws. 

Despite the official end of absolute monarchy in Thailand in 1932, the sovereign continues to wield enormous influence over Thai politics and society.

In 2017, the junta amended the law to give the new king complete control over the nation’s Crown Property Bureau, which manages real estate and investments valued by Forbes in 2012 at $30 billion. The next year, those holdings were signed directly over to King Mahavajiralongkorn himself. The military has consistently justified its often-violent interventions into Thai politics as necessary measures to defend the Crown.

Since taking power, Prayuth oversaw a steep rise in prosecutions under the nation’s infamous lèse-majesté legislation, which makes any criticism of the sovereign punishable by up to 15 years in prison. Pita’s campaign promise to amend these lèse-majesté laws helped propel the US-educated politician to victory earlier this year. It has now made him a target for the backers of an institution that brooks no criticism. 

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Prayuth played a decisive role in uniting the nation’s powerful business interests and conservative Bangkok elite behind the royal family in the face of mounting popular discontent with the Crown’s impunity, according to Titipol Phakdeewanich, dean of the faculty of political science at Thailand’s Ubon Ratchathani University. 

“We can see the establishment and strengthening of the power of the conservative group, which was intended to prevent the rise of the liberal forces in the country,” he said. “To some extent he has been able to force the conservative mindset, to strengthen support for the monarchy among the conservative group.”

Thai political scientist Pavin Chachavalpongpun, who lives in exile in Kyoto, Japan, after facing lèse-majesté charges for criticising the junta and its royal patrons following the 2014 coup, said Prayuth’s role in fusing the monarchy and military had directly set the stage for Pita’s failure on Thursday. 

“Prayuth left a legacy of the immense power of the military in politics,” Pavin told FRANCE 24 on Thursday. “But it’s not just about entrenching the power of the military in politics, but more importantly that of the monarchy too. Hence they attempted to put in place an infrastructure that would maintain their footholds in politics, and that has been the setting up of the senate as [an] instrument of the old elites. Today the senate did its job as designed by those elites.”

A history of violence

Prayuth, who was born into a military family and graduated from the Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy before becoming a commander in the prestigious and politically connected Queen’s Guards, is no stranger to the use of force for political ends.

In 2010, he was in charge of the troops that opened fire on the Red Shirt protesters who had stormed the capital from the opposition’s rural strongholds in support of ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. 

In 2014, the commander would launch his own putsch against Thaksin’s sister Yingluck, who had also been democratically elected on a platform of lifting Thailand’s rural poor out of poverty. Under the military junta that he led, which styled itself the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), Prayuth oversaw the redrafting of the country’s constitution, which tweaked the electoral process to make it harder for any one party to win a majority and gave the military government the authority to hand-pick the nation’s 250-strong senate ahead of the 2019 elections – which Prayuth, unsurprisingly, won. 

Titipol said that Prayuth’s nine-year grip on power had “left a big scar” on Thailand’s political system. 

“The constitution was initially written to make sure the NCPO, that is to say the coup-makers, could remain in power for another eight years after it was written,” he said.

As well as securing the military’s interests in parliament, Titipol said, the constitution gave the nation’s extra-parliamentary bodies broad powers to disband political parties – powers that a number of these institutions have used freely throughout Thailand’s shaky return to electoral politics. 

Ostensibly independent organs including the Constitutional Court, Election Commission and National Anti-Corruption Commission have all been accused by the opposition of selectively targeting challengers to a conservative coalition of forces that seeks to keep the royal family beyond any possible reproach. 

“The NCPO played its part in working closely with those politicised institutions,” Pavin said. “We must understand that those institutions predated the NCPO. If [the monarchy] would be a kind of network, then they are in the same network working to strengthen the prerogatives of the monarchy. The main objective is to eliminate challenges against the monarchy.”

Stacking the deck

On the eve of Thursday’s vote, the Election Commission recommended that Pita be suspended from parliament following an investigation that found that the lawmaker owned shares in a media company – prohibited under Thai electoral laws. Pita has said he inherited the shares in the iTV television station from his father, and that the station has not broadcast anything since 2007. 

The same day, the Constitutional Court accepted a petition filed by lawyer Theerayut Suwankesorn, who has claimed that by campaigning on reforming Thailand’s lèse-majesté laws, both Pita and his party have violated Article 49 of the 2017 constitution, which forbids citizens from trying to “overthrow the democratic regime of government with the King as Head of State”. The party has been given a fortnight to present their defence.

That same court has been instrumental in restricting the number of players on the political field. In 2020, the Constitutional Court dissolved the Future Forward Party – the predecessor to Pita’s Move Forward Party – and banned its leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, himself an outspoken critic of the monarchy, from politics for a decade.

The year before, the opposition Thai Raksa Chart Party had also been dissolved for proposing the king’s own sister as its prime ministerial candidate.

In 2022, the court ruled that Prayuth himself could stay in power until 2025, effectively extending his term limit beyond the eight years provided under the constitution – a limit he was on the verge of reaching, having appointed himself prime minister in the aftermath of the 2014 coup. 

“If you look at independent bodies in Thailand, they are not truly independent,” Titipol said. “They were to some extent created and appointed by Prayuth Chan-ocha himself, and his people remain there.”

Pita has given himself one final chance to win the premiership. But with the threat of parliamentary suspension hanging over him amid mounting legal challenges in the courts, the deck seems increasingly stacked against him.

For Titipol, this cordoning-off of Thailand’s political field from popular pressure is the lasting legacy of Prayuth Chan-ocha’s nine years in power. 

“Prayuth didn’t do any good for the future of Thai democracy,” he said. “His so-called Thai-style democracy is not liberal democracy, as he, and the military, still have control over the process.”