Last weekend wasn’t a good one for the opinion pollsters: elections in Thailand and Japan (previewed here) both produced results somewhat at variance with expectations.
Thailand was the more surprising one. Most people (including me) thought that the liberal People’s Party (previously called Move Forward) would again top the poll, raising the question of whether the military would find a way to prevent it taking office. But voters decided not to put the system to that sort of test, instead delivering victory to incumbent prime minister Anutin Charnvirakul and his conservative Bhumjaithai party.
On preliminary results, Bhumjaithai has 193 of the 500 seats, and its ally, the military-aligned Kla Tham, has another 58; with the support of various minor parties that would make for a quite comfortable majority. The People’s Party could only manage 118 seats, down 33 from its 2023 result, and the populist Pheu Thai is down 67 to 74. The Democrat Party (liberal but pro-establishment) is the only other one to reach double figures, with 22 seats (down three).
Describing the result in terms of votes is more difficult. Like Japan and many other countries, Thailand mixes both single-member and proportional seats; 400 MPs are elected by first-past-the-post in single-member districts, and the other 100 by nationwide party-list proportional representation (Sainte-Laguë, or something very close to it).* And as sometimes happens, people voted quite differently in the two.
I can’t find an English-language source, but Wikipedia has a table of the results, which shows the People’s Party topping the poll in the proportional vote with 29.7% but scoring only 23.5% in the constituencies. The Democrats had a similar problem, with 11.1% and 6.0% respectively. But for Bhumjaithai it was the other way around, with 18.1% proportional and 29.9% constituency, and for Kla Tham even more pronounced, with 1.8% against 11.5%. Only Pheu Thai was at similar levels for both, 15.6% and 17.3%.
So it looks as if the People’s Party enjoys widespread general support but has difficulty translating that into votes for its individual candidates. As the BBC’s Jonathan Head puts it, the People’s Party, being “relatively new and urban-based, is weaker because it lacks rural networks. Bhumjaithai, by comparison, is a past master at using its substantial resources to win local power-brokers to its side, and they exercise a lot of influence over voters in their areas.”
But there’s also concern about irregularities in the vote count, with the People’s Party calling for a nationwide recount. There’s as yet no evidence of a systematic problem, but the delay in finalising things is suspicious. It’s also given Anutin the excuse to avoid talking about the shape of the government he will form, and in particular whether he wants to broaden his base by offering to take Pheu Thai into his coalition.
In Japan it was a more straightforward but equally dramatic result, with a landslide victory for prime minister Sanae Takaichi and her Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). It was the party’s best ever result, winning a two-thirds majority in its own right for the first time, 316 of the 465 seats. Clearly Japanese voters are not put off by the idea of a female prime minister.
As always, the LDP was helped by the electoral system; its big win (again going by Wikipedia’s numbers) came from just 49.2% of the vote in the constituencies. (Less in the proportional vote, but unlike in Thailand the difference is predictable: the minor parties all do better on the proportional vote, the two major parties worse.) Its main opponent, the Centrist Reform Alliance, had 21.6% of the constituency votes but emerged with only 49 seats.
The polls were actually right about the votes – as I said in my preview, the opposition was “polling at only about half the LDP’s strength.” But most of them put its seat tally in the mid-200s, evidently understating the effect of the malapportionment. Further back were the LDP’s ally Ishin with 36 seats, the Democratic Party For the People with 28, the far-right Sanseito 15 and the new technocratic party Team Mirai 11.
In what has historically been mostly a party of fairly colorless (male) functionaries, Takaichi now has the opportunity to become one of Japan’s most significant leaders. For some thoughts on the challenges facing her and the directions she might take, Rin Ushiyama at the Conversation and Stephen Bartholomeusz in the nine newspapers are both well worth a read.
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* Not to be confused with the system used in New Zealand and Germany, which has both list and district MPs but is nonetheless purely proportional; the list votes alone determine the numbers in parliament. In Thailand and other mixed systems the proportional seats aren’t offset against the district seats in any way, they’re just added to them. Note also that in Japan the proportional seats are within multi-member districts rather than nationwide.
The World is Not Enough 