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Thailand’s February 2026 Snap Election: A Conversation with Prof Duncan McCargo
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We heard you.
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Nine years of Bring back the Snack Wrap and you've won. But maybe you should have asked for more. Say hello to the Hot Honey Snack Wrap. Now you've really won.
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Go to McDonald's and get it while you can.
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello, this is Dr. Petra Alderman, manager of the Saul Swee Hawk Southeast Asia Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science or the lse. Welcome to the Dialogues on Southeast Asia. This podcast is hosted by the Centre which promotes research and analysis on Southeast Asia at LSE in the UK and across the world. To sustain this work and secure the Centre's future, we rely on the support of partners and donors. If you would like to help us continue our activities, including this podcast, please contact us at SEAC admin, which is a dminsc.ac.uk in today's episode we are going to be delving into the 8th February 2020 snap election and constitutional referendum in Thailand. The result of the election came as a surprise to many as it delivered a decisive victory for current Prime Minister Anutin Chand Viragon, whose Pungjay Thai party has evolved from a regional party through to maybe more of a kingmaker party to now a national force in just over five years. Pum Jai Tai has successfully positioned itself as the go to Conservative party in Thailand in the run up to this election, effectively replacing the two pro military parties that were the legacy of Thailand's most recent military rule which lasted from 2014 until 2019. I'm very pleased to have the opportunity today to talk to Professor Duncan Macago, who is President's Chair in Global affairs at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Duncan, as many of you will know, works mainly on the comparative politics of Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, on which he has published widely. He's the author of dozens of books, including On Future Forward the Rise and Fall of a Thai Political Party, which is relevant to what we are going to be talking today. Now, Duncan is a podcasting veteran here on New Books Network, so I am really pleased to have the opportunity to talk to him about what actually happened during this recent election in Thailand. So welcome to the podcast Duncan.
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Great to be here. Yeah.
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So Duncan, I know that you were actually on the ground in the run up to the election and during the election day as well. If you can maybe tell us a little bit more about where did you go within the country and what was the mood? I mean, this election was not necessarily an election that was on schedule, it was a snap election, so it happened just three years after the 2023 election. So what kind of mood did you get from people on the ground, but also from political candidates? Were they ready for this poll?
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Right. So one of the privileges of now being based in Singapore is that it's possible to make quite quick trips to Thailand. And I was able to go than once in the past few weeks to different parts of the country to try and get a feel for what was happening as the campaign unfolded. I went to the Northeast, I went to the south. I was in Bangkok and a little bit around Bangkok, I talked to quite a few candidates and quite a few voters, as well as attending some campaign events, including a number of major rallies. So I've had a certain amount of exposure to what's been happening during the election. It's obviously a mixed picture with different vibes in different places. So maybe I should start talking about the Northeast, which is where I spend a bit of time in the beginning. So in the Northeast, really, there is this image that this is a zone previously overwhelmingly dominated by the Ptai Party. And many people, if you ask them what happened, would tell you that lots and lots of MPs defected from Pur Thai to Bumchaitai and other parties. That turns out not to be exactly true if you look at the numbers, because most of the people who defected from Pur Thai to Bumjai Thai and particularly Glatan, the new kid on the block in this election, were actually coming from the old conservative parties, particularly those you just mentioned, United Thai Nation and Palang Bisharan. So the picture was a little bit more complicated than it seemed, not least because Pertai had already seen quite substantial erosion of its position in the 2023 elections in places in the Northeast and indeed in the north. So we found many areas where the competition, though, was really intense. In some cases, there were turncoat Per Thai candidates re badged as, say, Bumjai Thai. In some places, the main competition seemed to be between Bumjai Thay and Galatam. But it wasn't always clear if this was a genuine competition, because some people told us that in fact there was a de facto alliance between parties. And that was evident in a place like Khonken, where it seemed like Glautham and Bumjaitai weren't that much running against each other. But in other places, we were told the plan is actually whichever candidate comes out on top will be the one who gets most of the funding. And then promised resources may not appear for some of these candidates at the last minute. If it's obvious that they're failing, which has been a kind of a long time strategy of parties like Bum Choai Thai. They're quite strategic in who they support. They do their own polling. So all the parties are going around polling the candidates and not necessarily telling these candidates themselves what the results are. That's a fairly common phenomenon. The difficulty really in the Northeast was trying to work out where the dividing lines now were between the political parties. Of course, if we go back to 2023, my good friend and colleague Napon and Jacob Ricks from smu, they published a wonderful article about age and ideology, arguing that the last election was clearly about generational contest. One of my favorite topics and quote unquote ideological contestation, which really means people were voting for or against the legacy of the coup, for or against the military aligned uncles, and for or against the alternative offered by the Move Forward Party, the Orange Wave, led at that point by the charismatic prime ministerial candidate Vitalim Juran Rat. So to what extent was this landscape that seemed to define the 2023 election still visible in an electoral heartland like the Northeast in 2026? I guess the answer is much less than one might think. That landscape was still there. Pertaj was obviously insisting that they were still a party with ideological roots, a party that had had a transformative effect on people's lives. I wish I had had at least 30 Baht for every time somebody had men. 30 Baht healthcare scheme, of course, a flagship program which dates back to the turn of the millennium. So per tie, candidates and supporters are constantly referring back to the good old days of the populist policies that emerged even before we called them populist policies and used that as an argument to say that these were parties that were really on the side of the people, on the side of democracy. But it wasn't always easy to see a clear cut distinction anymore between Ph? Thai and parties like Bumshai Thai, because in many ways the rhetoric that they were adopting with the emphasis most of the time on economic livelihood issues was actually rather similar.
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I mean, to me it seems that overall the campaign in terms of what was on offer was a lot less exciting than obviously what we saw in 2023. The parties have been converging maybe more on many of the offers than what was happening in 2023. And I think in large part that was also because the progressive course could no longer be as progressive in some ways. Obviously, proposals to reform the lesser magister level very much off the table in terms of it being a leading campaign topic which dominated the Discussions in the lead up to the 2023 election, but also with what was happening with the conflict with Cambodia. It seemed that anything that was potentially related to the military or strong reform agenda of the military was no longer there. Was that the kind of feel that you also get when you were going around the different, different parts of the country?
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Yeah, there was a much more muted sense of ideological difference, even from the progressive side. And what had happened in place of last time when it was the uncles or not, and then it was, you know, let's talk about reforming 1, 1, 2, let's majesty law or let's really place a big emphasis. Abolishing conscription or abolishing ISOC was a campaign theme in the Deep South. All of this stuff had sort of quietly disappeared. And when you ask candidates about some of these things, they say, oh yeah, no, we're still wanting to do these progressive things. We're just not shouting about it so much. We're letting particular figures in the party emphasize those themes. So, you know, we wrote is wheeled out at the final People's Party rally to say all this stuff about the military that no one else has quite been saying very much during most of the campaign. So there was this kind of a selective rendering of narratives. And the narrative that we got instead was all about gray. You know, greyness, gray business and tuntao and, you know, what it is to be gray and who will and will not work with the Grays. So the Grays kind of replaced the uncles. The bad guys stopped being the military people and they became the gray people. But for the most part, nobody was really specifying who the gray people were. And since most of the parties, except arguably the People's Party, have some figures who could be considered gray within them, there was quite a bit of, you know, the pot calling the kettle gray going on where everybody was, was throwing out this accusation of being gray at everybody else without really specifying a lot of the time what, what being grey meant. But, but gray was the new black. I mean, gray was the thing that everybody wanted to distance themselves from. And that cast a strange cloudy pallor over the whole election because we couldn't quite see the colors of the campaign for this overhanging grayness and very ill defined grayness. And grayness, of course, is supposed to be about illicit business and scam centers and things like that. And sometimes this was talked about more explicitly, but rarely were names named. For the most part, gray was just invoked as this evil thing that was engulfing Thailand that needed to be purged. From the rainbow.
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Did you feel that this kind of narrative about this grayness, that it was something that people were also picking up, voters were picking up? Were they mentioning that as something that would concern them, perhaps to such an extent that it would have a level of traction, or was it more that when you were talking to the voters, voters, they were coming up with maybe different concerns and issues that were at the forefront of their mind when it came to actually this election, practically all
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candidates from every party confirmed that most of the questions they were getting from voters were about livelihood issues and people's economic concerns. I mean, the Thai economy is not in a great state. There are people trying to argue that it's improving, that there are some positive signs and so on. I heard Aik Nitty, the finance minister, on the Bunchai Thai stage the other night, making the case for why actually the Thai economy is now turning a corner under their kind of masterful technocratic tutelage. But if you ask ordinary people out and about around Thailand how they're doing economically, the answers are pretty grim. Most people feel that the economy is really bad, that things have become very expensive, that they can't sell their goods and services, that they're struggling to keep up, that they're getting into debt. All of this kind of stuff which we have been hearing for a while, but I think much more at the forefront of people's consciousnesses than in the last couple of elections. And that meant that the quote, unquote ideological stuff, which in this case had morphed into this, are you gray? Are you with or are you with or against the Grays? This quasi ideological stuff was less salient. And it was also more difficult for, for example, the People's Party to monopolize this discourse. So the, the Democrats, for example, came out strongly against gray business in all of its forms, despite the fact that we know some prominent figures in the recent history of the Democrat Party have been characters that one could characterize as gray. So this is an interesting phenomenon that was taking place, but it had the effect of dulling the edges so of the ideological divisions that were on much more explicit display in 2023.
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Yeah, and I think one of the things that you said is quite interesting maybe to reflect on as well, and it's that sense from the voters that economically Thailand was not doing well. And I think it is in a stark contrast perhaps to the mood ahead of the 2023 election, where obviously voters, especially those who, you know, we would maybe consider the traditional supporters of Purtite Party, which obviously had policy track record or relative success when? Way back when, you know, at the beginning of 2000 and the taxing. I think people back then were very hopeful that if Huatai's party was to get back to power at that point, that they would feel the difference and economically Thailand would get better. But obviously the past three years have been marred by a lot of policy failures. The government was not stable, it wasn't able to deliver on some of their flagship policies really. So do you think that this has also perhaps played into further electoral decline of Purtai in this election?
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Yeah. So Pothy's been in a difficult situation obviously in this election, not least because they were at least notionally running the country for two years. And during those two years the promised economic revival didn't happen because. Well, I've written about this in an article called the Real Deal about the politics that shaped the formation of the Zeta government back in 2023, the deal making that took place between the pro military side and the taxon side. And clearly this was a highly transactional arrangement based on certain kinds of understandings. And you might ask yourself, why would the establishment, the conservative side, agree to bring Thaksin back? Well, one of the reasons that they brought him back was obviously that they hoped he could help revive the economy and therefore restore legitimacy. And that didn't happen. Essentially the flagship economic policy of the 2023 campaign for pertinent the digital wallet pretty much bombed. First of all, it stopped being digital, it just became a wallet. But then quite a lot of people I came across and quite a lot of candidates I came across told me that people complained they'd never received this money that they were meant to have received. So the distribution of of the wallets was also very problematic. And that meant that when Pertai started talking about new populist policies, including this lottery where lots of people would get the chance to win a million baht, which one candidate was incredibly excited about and insisted I took pictures of him standing next to a giant poster explaining it. A lot of people were a bit skeptical about this stuff because we'd kind of been there before with purtite and their promises. And there hasn't been a really good story to tell about what happened economically during the protein government. And then of course there wasn't a good story to tell about how the government ended. Although actually the. With Hun Sen and the phone call and so on came up remarkably little. There was a sense that people seemed to have moved on from that particular episode, which you might have thought they'd still have remembered since it was only back in June and this was an election held pretty quickly in early February. But already people's attentions had moved on. Of course, Anantin took the opportunity after the election results were coming in to thank Ng Ying Phra Tongtan for her helpful contributions to his election. So it wasn't, it was in the back of people's minds that it was not as prominent as you might have expected. But yeah, Potai imploded for a variety of reasons. They did lose some seats from defectors. They lost though, primarily as a result of a collapse in their party list vote and the loss of many, many constituencies to Bum, Chaitai and Glatam, where they were being really, really put under a lot of pressure, both in terms of the image of the party and in terms of the amount of money that was being spent in the election.
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Yeah. Before we maybe turn to looking at the results and what actually the results say, and I should mention that at this point that the results have not yet been certified, but I think it is highly unlikely that they would swing in any spectacular way to change the
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actual, especially given the Election Commission's reluctance to have any recounts. Even in case your recount seems to be fairly overwhelmingly strong.
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Exactly. But before we get to that, what I wanted to ask you as well was perhaps what was the mood in the South? Because obviously in the run up to the election there seemed to be, at least based on some pre election polls, a bit of a resurgence going in for the Democrats. Democrat Party used to be the party that voters would be fairly loyal to in part of the south, not the deep south, but the rest of the South. That obviously seemed to have tanked quite a lot since 2019. Obviously back then, Abbasid was still the party leader. He then stepped down again. The party didn't do very well in 2023. Now Abbasid came back as the party leader and there seemed to have been a bit of a surge in popularity. But despite that, the party has lost quite a lot of constituency seats. So the constituencies have gone down compared to 2023. And what was, I think quite interesting was also that obviously there was this huge flooding issue in Hatayan not long before the election. And there was a lot of conversation around that time that that would actually harm Anil because his government was not dealing very well with this. So did people forget? How did that play out in the South? What did you get? You know, what were the issues people were talking about the most? What was the position of the different candidates? Is Is Democrat Party back in favor? In some ways. I mean, they've managed to get some partyless seats, but it's not looking like a revival yet.
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Yes, so this was the first time I'd actually spent time in the Upper south, as opposed to where my heart is, the Deep south or the southern border provinces of Pataniyala, Narati, Wat. But this time I went both to the Deep south and a bit into the Upper south. And I was in Songkhla during the election and I attended a big Democrat Party rally in Hathiya, which was, according to people from the party that I talked to at the time and communicated with afterwards. They regarded that as perhaps their most successful rally of the campaign and their most successful rally for many years. It felt like the Democrats were back. The atmosphere was really very, very intense, almost electric. Large number of people there. Abhisit was back on stage, talking, apparently without any notes for 40 minutes and having the crowd eat out of his hand. It was a really well done event. And it was hard not to believe that you were looking at a party that was really on the way back up, but it wasn't true. So when you looked closely at what was going on in that rally, which was very interesting, there were nine candidates in Sancla, and two of those candidates were the candidates that were really featured significantly and given prominence in the rally. And those were the two that went on to win, including Jerry, who's this TikTok influencer, who was the candidate in District 2, which is the. The main Hapye district. So the Democrats were able to take advantage of Jaytaya's inept handling, to put it politely, of the flooding, and use that as a significant campaign tool in the areas most directly affected by the flooding, which also included District 9, the other District that they won. And that was a card that they. They managed to play extremely well. Neverth the overall picture in Songkhla and elsewhere in the south was pretty dismal. And to be honest, I wasn't really surprised because I had gone around and talked to people who follow the south closely, some analysts, and also talked to some candidates in other provinces. And it seemed to me nobody could tell me where the winnable seats were. I kept asking people, yeah, but how many seats could they win? Where exactly are these seats? Nakhon came up and sure enough, there'd been some seats in Nakhon and there was a couple of seats in Sans Claire and a couple of others. But the expectations that they were going to do better were all predicated on them also winning some seats in Bangkok again, which didn't happen. So take away the party list and the party would be in a very bad way. Of course, one of the major reasons why they lost the seats is because the sitting MPs defected to other parties on the conservative spectrum. So they experienced a parallel kind of problem to what those parties experienced elsewhere and also to a lesser extent what happened to Protei in some areas. But yeah, the Democrats are sort of back in the sense that they have a better story to tell about themselves now and they managed to regain a much higher level of public credibility, which is reflected in that dramatically improved party list vote. But as far as the constituencies are concerned, I think even they would have to admit that they were quite disappointed not to not get a good few more.
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A
And I think this really brings us nicely to another big point though. If we look at the election results, which as I said are yet to be confirmed and certified by the election commission, there are a number of stories, different stories that the election results say. And obviously in Thailand the electoral system is rather complicated. So people can cast two ballots. One is for the constituency seat and the other one is for the party seat. And the House of Representatives is basically all in all 500 seats. But 400 of those are based on the constipation seats. And then the remaining hundred are partyless seeds. So the results are always going to be skewed way more towards the constituency results. But looking at the result, it is quite interesting because when you look at the constituency level results, obviously Pum Chai Thai has done really well. I mean the projection is that they will have 174 based on the current results, seats from constituencies. But then also Gratam, as you've mentioned before, has done really well with 56 seeds. A lot of that has been picked across the north, some of them in the northeast, some of them in the central. And there seems to be a lot of movement from, as you mentioned before, the conservative parties of the two uncles towards Gratham and Pumjay Tha in those areas. And then other parties like People's Party, they did a lot worse arguably than they did in 2023. So they lost quite a few constituencies to various different parties. Obviously a lot of it went over to Pung Jai Thai and Gladham in certain areas. And obviously Democrats have also lost the constituency seats. And then when you flick to look at the party list seats, the story is completely different. It's dominated once again by orange. So people have still voted for the progressive cause. Putay still retained party Listed, although they have lost many as well. Then we see the resurgence of Democrats in the south again regaining some of that party list. So it seems that at the constituency level people are leaning more conservative. At the national level, there's still some space for maybe the progressive cause. And then when you mix in the constitutional referendum, then it seems that people still want some level of change. So how do you interpret these three different stories? Because it's almost like three different elections all in one. So how can we fully understand and what do Thai people want in terms of the direction for the country and how has this played out?
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B
Yeah, I mean this is a classic problem that to some degree we've had before where people do a lot of vote splitting. So I know quite a number of people who admitted to me that they voted for a parliamentary candidate from a different party from the one for whom they cast their party list vote. That's been a pretty widespread phenomenon. So many people will vote for a local candidate to for a variety of reasons, which might be that they've been paid, it might be that they know the person and have been voting for them for a long time. They might have some family or personal connection, they might have helped them out with something, but then at the same time vote for the party that they actually prefer. And quite a few people, for example, per Thai voters who have actually switched in terms of their party list vote to orange because of some dissatisfaction with what's been going on in Pertai. That would be one example or even. Well, we went to Buli Lam last time in 2023, and in that province there was an overwhelming sweep of party list votes by the then Move Forward Party, the Orange Party. Whilst all the constituencies were won by showing that people for whatever reason were happy to vote for their candidates, but they were not really that keen on the party itself. So that kind of phenomenon is really widespread. And then things were complicated this time by the referendum. There were rumors that some vote canvasses, some parties were quietly encouraging people to vote no in the referendum, hoping to sabotage the whole thing. But that clearly wasn't done all that systematically. So the referendum passes. You know, it hasn't really been a referendum on the constitution because there isn't a constitution and nobody knows what might be in the constitution. So the referendum partly became a referendum on the orange agenda and would you like things to change in Thailand? And on that point people said yes. Then they proceeded to vote in rather large numbers for conservative parties that are dead against the change and that we actually know will almost certainly never amend the constitution and certainly not in a progressive way. So yes, structural contradictions were absolutely rife here. And again we saw the People's Party do incredibly well in Bangkok and decisively top the party list vote nationally by something like twice the narrow. So that is an irony. It's quite difficult to make sense of all these results and it will take some time to process the implications. A lot of money has been thrown around which has influenced outcomes in certain places. But the other thing that's quite complicated here is trying to understand how vote splitting has resulted in people who might not naturally have won winning. So they have the Phuket phenomenon that was most acute when they were won. The Orange Party won all three Phuket seats last time because the Conservative party split the vote amongst themselves, thereby allowing the progressives to win. So there's that kind of situation and the reverse in many places where for example, if the people who didn't like Bumjai Thai decided to vote in more or less equal numbers for Pur Thai and People's Party, then Pum Jatai could end up winning even though the total number of votes for those other two parties was greater. So there's quite a lot of that that it's all at the margins. Who are the strong candidates in each area where you've got two strong candidates from, quote unquote, one side or another. If we can still talk about Pur Thai as being on a different side from Punta Thai, which is a tricky assumption to make, but if we can make that assumption, or at least if that assumption to some extent still existed in voters minds, then you can see how that split was in many ways quite helpful to the conservative side. But they're also also seats that People's Party and Protai managed to win or for the most part hold on to because of splits in the conservative vote.
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A
Yeah, and I think this is true as well. And as you pointed out, I think this is a very valid point that Obviously back in 2023 the Conservative vote was very much split between the two pro military parties. If you added up those numbers, that Conservative bloc was still powerful back then anyway this time around, obviously there was was a much clearer bearer of the conservative flag. So there wasn't as much splitting in that sense. Whereas obviously as you said, the people who were maybe not fully behind Poom Jai Thai had few other options on the other side, quote unquote in that sense. So we probably saw a reverse of that trend in some ways. I would also want to maybe press a little bit on the point of view. I mean, obviously there's been a lot of analyses and a lot of stuff written about the and Cambodia conflict and potentially how much that might have influenced the electoral result. Especially. I mean, Anutin never really shied away from using the conflict as part of his campaign strategy. Even when he was in government, he really took a very strong stance and very nationalist and sort of conservative stance on the issue. So I think maybe there's been a lot of. And I've seen some analysis saying, oh, you know what, this was basically the rally around the flag effect and or team won because of what was happening. But I feel that the story there is a little bit more complicated. And if we look at the results, fair enough. Apart from Bondrachitani, which is one of the provinces that also borders Cambodia, the other three provinces have kind of gone dark blue. So both on the constituency vote and largely also on the the party list vote. So that sort of feels like perhaps. But I think when we look at Thailand as a whole, to what extent would you say that that really had any traction?
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B
Yeah, I mean, the absence of really good opinion polls in Thailand makes it extremely difficult to quantify and to make firm statements about this. Anecdotally, I can say that I asked a lot of candidates, even in parts of the Northeast that don't border on Cambodia, and people were saying, oh, this is. This isn't coming up at all. Nobody's really interested in this. This is not swaying the voters one way or another. Then I would meet a candidate who would say, no, this really, really important. This has been a defining thing for us. There's no doubt the People's Party did suffer from some kind of tagging that was assigned to it as a result of that. So it all became about, do you. Do you love the nation? Are you loyal to the nation? Do you love our military? And there was all this discussion about how could Peter say such a terrible thing as questioning why it is that we need a military? Don't we know now why we need a military? So that line was coming. How far it really proved decisive, I'm not sure. I think think it's the people who are most attached to that explanation of people from the outside looking in.
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A
Exactly.
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B
And of course, you and I have been part of an article critiquing the idea that everything in Thai politics can be reduced to US China relations. And in the same way, I don't think domestic Thai politics can be reduced to Thai Cambodian relations either, but definitely at the margins and in certain specific areas. And Amongst certain groups of people, maybe particularly older people, online groups who are highly susceptible to certain kinds of sentiments. This, this has swayed some voters and that swaying may have been decisive in certain districts and may have moved a certain number of seats in direction. It's certainly, I think, where it was useful, not just in and of itself. I think Bumjaitai's main problem in the past was that for conservatives, it wasn't a real conservative party party, it was a transactional party pretending to be conservative opportunistically. And the whole Thai Cambodia conflict allowed Anujin and Pumchatai to position themselves sort of say, no, we actually are a genuine conservative party. And whatever misgivings you might have had about us in the past, you need to set aside because we are the ones who are going to save the nation. And in general terms, I think that rebranding was helpful, even where it can't be specifically tied to people's direct concerns about the Thai Cambodian conflict. Because just as the uncle's telephone conversation was pretty much forgotten by the time of the election, I think for a lot of people they have moved on from this because the issue hasn't been resolved. It goes into the lumpen category of massive critical issues in Thailand that haven't been resolved. Along with the situation in the deep south or the ongoing problem of cranes falling over and construction projects going awry and buildings falling down in earthquakes. It goes into that general category of annoying issues that people fixate on for a while and then tend to pay less attention to over time. But it's definitely an issue that did help Bumjaitai rebrand itself and win over some of the royalists who had never really thought that Buongjaitai was a party that represented.
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A
And obviously when we look at the Results Compared to 2023, that election felt in many way very different to what we were used to seeing entire election that election felt like was election full of hope. People really want to change. Obviously People's Party won. The difference between People's Party well back then Move Forward Party and Hutai was 10 seats only. But still that was a feed in itself to unseat taxing from the position of an electoral winner. Now, three years, well, not even full three years later, we have a shift that seems to be more towards conservative, at least when we look at the aggregate results. Do you think that the progressive cause is then very much dead? I mean, you know, given the fact that people still want to change, but then, you know, we have a government that it's probably not going to be too keen to revise the constitution because they're benefiting from the current system massively in terms of also electoral rules and everything else that goes with it. Do you think that this is the end of the problem, progressive cause as we know it in Thailand?
- [35:26]
B
Well, I don't think that because, you know, there are a number of things that come up here. We have the 10 million or so party list votes that the People's Party got. You have the referendum result, you have the Bangkok seats, the continuing attachment of a lot of people living in urban areas to this more progressive type of politics that hasn't gone away. I think there are a number of things that were difficult for the People's Party this time. You know, if you look at the seats that lost, most of the seats they lost were constituencies. The party has had for a long time a problem understanding the nature of representative politics, because there's a kind of orthodoxy within the orange parties that the function of MPs is to legislate and to be in Parliament and not to go to their constituencies. And that somehow, in a highly developed, modern, sophisticated democracy, MPs don't pay any attention to their constituents. But that those of us, you know, who come from the UK or are familiar with the United States or other Western democratic systems are extremely aware that this has absolutely nothing to do with reality, that MPs and congressmen go back to their constituencies every weekend, even in parliamentary systems that are supposedly considerably more mature than the Taiwan. So there's been this fundamental misunderstanding that somehow the role of the orange parties was to reprogram people's brains and explain to them that politicians weren't supposed to do the things that they thought they were supposed to do, but to do something else. And that was clearly not going to work. So you had a lot of constituency MPs who over the past three years spent very little time really listening to the concerns of local people and getting out and about because they felt that that was not their job. And those people are out on their ears. And the constituency MPs who were still there are the ones who actually quietly ignored whatever nonsense the party was telling them about what their role was and actually did go back to their constituencies and spent as much time as possible on the grounds throughout the time in office. So this is a reality check for the People's Party, that this fantasy politics where legislators do nothing outside the legislature, needs to be rethought that that was a part of the problem. And then there's the leadership question, because Obviously, Pitao was highly charismatic and there's a very important element in the appeal of the Orange parties that has to be centered on highly attractive, highly communicative, very social media savvy leadership figures onto whom people can project all kinds of stuff that has very little to do with politics at all. And again, the People's Party has been in a kind of denial about this. They have not wanted to acknowledge the FAND and they needed really to run with it. Pizza personally kind of ran with it against the grain of what the party liked. The party sort of thought that that was not what they should be doing, but actually it is what they needed to be doing because they needed to win some seats. And they're up against some incredibly powerful forces in the Thai state and society. And if you're going to take on those forces, you can't do it simply by reciting a lot of idealistic policy platforms and talking about the long term restructuring of the Thai bureaucracy and so on. You need actually to do stuff that appeals to people and, and be quite about the way that you do it, because this is how politics works in, in the 2000 and twenties. So these were the things that really made it very difficult for the People's Party to replicate their success. They'd had this, you know, they've got all these people who are very good at creating charts and graphs and these people just drew a line from 2019 to 2023 and then carried on assuming that they're going to get over 200 seats this time. And politics isn't like that. Political parties, as any of us who've lived anywhere other than Thailand, with dominant parties who are around for decades and decades, we know those parties rise up and then they crash and burn. It happens to major parties in every European democracy. So the idea that they were just going to go up inevitably this time and all the others would better be ready for them to top the polls again. This was very, very, very, very misplaced form of optimism, I think. Yeah.
- [39:38]
A
To what extent also, do you think that there might have been been a level of, dare I say, perhaps voters fatigue or that kind of realization settling in, that if they keep voting for Orange because of the current system, the political system, how it is set and how it was set up by the military through the 2017 Constitution, that even if People's Party, let's say, was to own a landslide and could form a government without needing to go into, you know, precarious kind of coalition deals and so on and so forth, that they ultimately still might not be allowed to govern? Was there a level of recognition of that? Did people realize that? Did that perhaps play into their decision making of who to vote for? Or was that not really a major, major consideration?
- [40:26]
B
This is where we really do need survey data. But yes, of course you do come across people say, well we tried that before, we voted for these people, we still like them. But the fact is, you know, last time Peter didn't get to be Prime Minister and so. So is there any point in going down this road like I not make a more pragmatic choice? I'm sure some people thought like that. It wasn't most people and the gap isn't that huge between the result this time and last time. It's about 30 seats or something. But yes, there was an element of that going on. Clearly there has to have been an element of that going on and that's why a party like the People's Party cannot afford to let up either on the, the leadership front or the working, the grassroots front. Yeah, indeed, you've got to work every angle that you possibly can.
- [41:16]
A
Indeed. Well, I'm aware that we are run running against the time, but perhaps if we were to step back and I will ask you to perhaps take your crystal ball out of your pocket and tell me whether you believe that this electoral result perhaps can finally lead to some kind of stability and that perhaps Anutin, given the number of seats that he won and potentially if he goes to a coalition arrangement with the likes of Clatham and Putai, he will have quite a large number of seats in Parliament. Could that translate into an overall stability where we see a Thai government finally survive a full term? Or do you foresee that there are potentially still some problems further down the road?
- [41:59]
B
Yeah, I mean it's very hard to make predictions, especially when the government hasn't yet been following reformed. But clearly the Conservative side has been trying to crack the electoral puzzle for decades. They haven't actually since the 80s been able to win. This is the first time in 40 years, essentially the Conservative side appears decisively, convincingly to have won an election. They tried it with the Democrats by reorganizing power back in the day in 2008. 9 and that didn't translate into a party that could win the 2011 election. Then they tried forming these military aligned parties which ultimately, ultimately were fairly shambolic and didn't even last as substantial parties into round three of the the boxing match as it were. So the Conservative side has settled on Khumjai Thai as its chosen vehicle and the result is what we have. If we assume that most of the destabilization of governments comes from the conservative side and their dissatisfaction with the nature of the parties that have won the election or the deals that they've made with other parties, then we have to assume the conservative side is not, not going to be incentivized to destabilize an Anatin Phun Chaitai led coalition where the ruling party or the dominant party has close to 200 seats. But you know, Thai politics is always highly unpredictable. There is obviously a backlash afoot against some of the things that are going on at the moment, some feeling of unease. And we can never rule out people starting to express that dissatisfaction and starting to destabilize things again. So there we are. Making predictions in the Thai context is very unwise, which is why Trump almost never to make them.
- [43:38]
A
Indeed. Well, but thank you very much for indulging me with this final question. Unfortunately, we are out of time, but it's been an absolute pleasure to have you and to be able to look and delve deep into the Thai election and election results. So thank you so much for taking time to do so.
- [43:55]
B
My great pleasure.
- [43:56]
A
Thank you. This was Dr. Petra Alderman, the manager of the Sorcery Hook Southeast Asia Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the elementary school you've been listening to the Dialogues of Southeast Asia podcast. Thank you.