Earlier this year we noted the decision of Thailand’s constitutional court to effectively treat criticism of the monarchy as a breach of the Thai constitution, pointing out that it could be used as a basis to dissolve the main opposition party, Move Forward, and ban its leaders. Sure enough, last week that’s exactly what happened. Members of the party’s executive committee have been banned from politics for ten years.
So far as expected. But the court didn’t stop there: this week, the court took on the government as well, removing prime minister Srettha Thavisin from office on a technicality (he had briefly appointed a minister who had once been jailed for corruption, a fairly routine occurrence in Thailand).
Readers may remember that last year’s Thai election resulted in a lower house of parliament in which none of the three main power blocs – Move Forward, the military-backed establishment and the populist Pheu Thai party – could command a majority on its own, and the majority in the military-appointed Senate blocked the formation of a coalition government between Move Forward and Pheu Thai.
So Pheu Thai did a deal with the military. Pheu Thai’s exiled leader, Thaksin Shinawatra, returned to Thailand and served a short term of imprisonment before being paroled earlier this year, and its nominee, Srettha, became prime minister in a coalition that included the military-backed parties. In return, the military got to keep Move Forward and its dangerously reformist views out of power.
In the unsatisfactory circumstances that the military-drafted constitution had created, this wasn’t a bad compromise. It produced a government that genuinely had majority support. The banning of Move Forward and its leadership didn’t fundamentally change things – it will resurface under a new name and things will continue more or less as before, just as they did when its predecessor, Future Forward, was dissolved in 2020.
But the unseating of Srettha throws a spanner in the works. It suggests one of two things: either that the establishment wants to clip Pheu Thai’s wings, reducing it to a subordinate place in the government if not evicting it altogether, or else that the constitutional court has gone rogue, and instead of doing the establishment’s bidding is following some unknown agenda of its own.
Perhaps it was too much to expect that the long enmity between Thaksin and the establishment could be consigned to the past. If this decision was simply in the nature of a warning shot, then maybe the two unlikely partners will settle back down under a new leader. But whatever the establishment’s motives, it will at least set Pheu Thai thinking about the possibility of renewed co-operation with (the new incarnation of) Move Forward.
As last year’s election demonstrated, the military has no hope of winning a majority in its own right. If it is not to give up on democracy altogether (an all-too-real possibility, as neighboring Myanmar demonstrates), it has to come to terms with one of its two rivals. Taking on both at once does not seem like a promising strategy.
UPDATE, 21 August: Pheu Thai duly nominated Paethongtarn Shinawatra, Thaksin’s daughter, who had led it into last year’s election, as its candidate for prime minister. With no-one offering an alternative, she was approved by both parliament and king and sworn in on Sunday. She becomes Thailand’s second female prime minister, following her aunt Yingluck, who was removed by a military coup in 2014 – not the most auspicious precedent.
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