JOIN USThai rulers must accept poll results
Thai opposition parties have won an emphatic victory in the general elections to the country’s parliament. In first place is the progressive Move Forward Party (MFP), which has won 152 seats in the 500-seat lower house of parliament. Following it closely is the populist Pheu Thai Party (PTP), which has bagged 141 seats. The two are expected to join hands to form a coalition government and are already in talks.
They are also reaching out to other parties.
By extending a strong mandate to anti-establishment parties, voters have dealt the country’s military-backed conservative parties a slap in the face. MFP and PTP have won three times the number of seats that Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha’s United Thai Nation Party, and his former party Palang Pracharath, both royalist-military parties, have won. Yet, they could be pipped to the post.
Under the country’s 2017 constitution, a party or coalition must secure at least 376 seats in the lower house, else it will have to face a vote in the Senate. MFP and PTP are well short of the 376-seat mark. Will they be able to cobble together the required seats to avoid a vote in the Senate? A nod from the Senate is almost impossible as all its 250 members are appointed by the military. It is highly unlikely that the Senate will endorse a government led by the MFP and its chief Pita Limjaroenrat, as they are in favour of scrapping Thailand’s controversial lese majeste laws, which criminalise criticism of the monarchy.
The Thai people have emphatically rejected the conservative establishment. The latter must heed the writing on the wall. Rarely has it done so. Although Thaksin Shinawatra’s Thai Ruk Thai Party, a forerunner of the PTP, won a landslide in the 2005 election, the military ousted him in a coup. Although the PTP secured a massive victory in the 2011 election, Prayut Chan-o-cha, who was then the army chief, removed the Yingluck Shinawatra government in a coup in 2014. Since 1933, the military has staged 18 coups, repeatedly signalling that it has little respect for the people’s mandate or democracy. It is not just the military-monarchy combine that is anti-democratic. The Election Commission and the courts could stand in the way of the people’s mandate, too. The EC has to validate the results. As for the judiciary, it has a long history of politically-motivated rulings. It forced the disbanding of the MFP’s previous avatar, the Future Forward Party, on a technicality in 2020.
Fighting the military-monarchist conservative establishment will not be easy. Yet parties, politicians and the people must stand together to ensure that anti-democratic sections do not overturn the verdict.