“We are the new consensus for Thai politics, economics and society,” the 42-year-old told This Week in Asia.
Move Forward’s themes of personal and political freedom, entrepreneurship and economic equality – and an end to the military’s grip on politics and mandatory conscription – chime with millennials, born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s, and their Gen Z successors, who together account for more than 40 per cent of eligible voters.And in Thailand’s bedraggled democracy, where election results are routinely crossed out by coups or courts, Pita, whose uncle was a close aide to former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, warns there may be few better opportunities ahead to cauterise the military’s influence.“Thailand is at a crossroads; one way leads us to finally turn into a fully democratic country,” said Pita, a Harvard graduate nicknamed ‘Tim’, who was an executive for the Grab app before becoming an MP in 2019.
The other path returns 69-year-old Prayuth Chan-ocha – or a messy alliance involving his army “big brother” and deputy Prawit Wongsuwon – to power, with the help of votes from their older traditional base.What to know about the major candidates, parties contesting Thailand’s election
Political soldiers
Thailand has been led by the arch-royalist former army chief Prayuth since his 2014 coup. It was the 13th army power grab in nine decades – roughly one every seven years – by a military that refuses to accept a role on the political sidelines for long.
Prayuth has clung on despite mass protests and criticism that under his stewardship Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy has become one of Asia’s most unequal, and that he is a bad fit for the needs of a smarter digital age.
Last year, Thailand grew at the slowest rate among the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’s member states. And experts say the nation’s near full employment figures belie the fact that most Thais rely on low-value, low-paid work.
Growth this year – predicted at 3.6 per cent by the World Bank – is being driven mainly by rebounding tourism, masking the struggles of small businesses and steep household debt.
Now Prayuth wants the public, and his allies in the 250-seat senate – whose members are all currently appointed by the military – to help him back to the prime minister’s office under the banner of the new United Thai Nation party.
“I know all of the problems and I have the experience to fix them,” he told reporters recently.
Pro-democrats are adamant his nine-year term in office is ample proof of the opposite.
With 4 million people voting for the first time on May 14, Move Forward hopes to turn its big urban crowds and top Twitter trends into seats.
Five hundred members of the House of Representatives will be elected, with the prospective prime minister needing to be approved by more than half of the combined 750-member assembly, which includes the 250 senate members.
To have enough “bargaining power” to join a government, the Move Forward Party needs 80 to 100 seats as “a reasonable starting point”, said Napon Jatusripitak, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, but there are big question marks over its wider appeal.
“They’ll face an uphill battle in constituencies outside cities where the MFP either does not have a strong set of candidates to compete on equal terms with candidates backed by money or patronage networks. Or where the MFP will be contesting directly against Pheu Thai,” Napon said.
Loyalty test
Pheu Thai is Thailand’s biggest party and leads the opposition in parliament.
It is the vehicle of the Shinawatra political dynasty, whose patron Thaksin wrenched Thailand’s closed and elite-focused political arena wide open in 2001 with pro-poor policies including universal healthcare, scholarships and village development funds.
Social welfare and a reputation for sound economic management has won his family three landslide election victories in two turbulent decades.
But it has also earned the Shinawatras the loathing of the Bangkok-based establishment, which hit back with a coup against him, in 2006, and then against the government of his sister Yingluck in 2014.
This time the Shinawatras are represented by Thaksin’s youngest daughter Paetongtarn, 36, who has been running a vigorous campaign while pregnant, alongside Srettha Thavisin, the former boss of real estate developer Sansiri.They are hard-selling the idea of another landslide – 310 seats or more – and suggest votes for Move Forward risk cannibalising the pro-democracy share of seats.
Pheu Thai leaders have been unclear over a potential political marriage with former rivals Palang Phracharat if they fall short in May, while Move Forward says it will not stomach such an alliance.
Both pro-democracy parties need a lower house majority big enough to ensure constitutional changes to make the senate an elected body; junta-written rules mean it was hand-picked by Prayuth and his allies.
The 250 senators are expected to line up behind their favoured party and prime minister, likely to be one of the two former generals Prayuth or Prawit, to whom they owe their jobs.
“We’re talking about the politics of appointed versus elected,” Pita said. “We’re still in that old consensus where we can’t find the right constitution, the right economic structure, the right political players and systems that can cope with the new normal of Thailand.”
One step forward …
Move Forward emerged from the ashes of the Future Forward Party, which rattled Thailand’s conservatives with its uncompromising reform agenda and 6.3 million votes in the 2019 election. Those catapulted a party without existing patronage networks into third place.It was helmed by Thanathorn Juangroongrungkit, an heir to the Thai Summit Group, one of Asia’s largest car-parts firms, and the star of the pro-democracy movement.
But the party was banned by the courts a few months after the last election. Thanathorn was also barred from political office for a decade. Yet he remains the most in-demand selfie on the campaign circuit and a polite yet unflinching debater on Thai TV.
Thanathorn appears in markets across the country, megaphone in hand promoting Move Forward’s candidates: start-up founders, teachers, law professors and even craft beer entrepreneurs – a contrast to the technocrats or old families who are force fed into Thailand’s political machine.
As Thaksin’s daughter readies for Thai polls, army and youth pose challenges
Move Forward wants to hack back at the monopolies that have spun billions of dollars out of Thailand’s economy and used it to buy shopping centres or football teams overseas.
“Japan has a similar-sized alcohol market as Thailand, and has 40,000 players,” Pita explains. “Thailand has seven. That says it all.”
The party also wants to reboot Thailand’s tepid foreign policy, starting with taking a firm stance on the crisis in neighbouring Myanmar, including a “humanitarian corridor”.
Charges under that law have been thrown at scores of young pro-democracy protesters who have taken in protests against Prayuth and called out the monarchy in mass rallies that began after Future Forward was disbanded.
Critics accuse the MFP of arrogance and are suspicious of the young radicals it draws in who show little love for older powers and patronage politics.
And where Pheu Thai still leans heavily on populist cash handouts, Move Forward sees structural revisions as the quickest route out of Thailand’s political quagmire.
“It’s been a lost decade, everything in the world is disrupting Thailand,” Pita said, lamenting his country’s lack of agility in the face of the pandemic, US-China decoupling and the gains made by Indonesia and Vietnam on the once pacesetting supply chain hub of Thailand.
“It is possible. In 1993, South Korea changed … the coups stopped and the economy began to grow,” he said.
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Ritual curse performed by protesters demanding ouster of Thai prime minister
Ritual curse performed by protesters demanding ouster of Thai prime minister
Will anything change?
For many young Thais, time has already passed them by, with their entire adult lives shaped by instability, coups, violent protests and acrimony across a divided society.
Software engineer Wat, 24, says he recently leapt at the chance to leave Thailand for Britain to work in AI-related machine learning.
“No one around my age particularly likes the government,” he said, requesting anonymity to avoid any recriminations from his work. “And a lot of them are learning English for the express purpose of eventually moving overseas.”
Gen Z ideals are entwining with the practical incentives to leave.
“In Thailand, the wealth concentration is just ridiculous, especially in Bangkok. Even if you’re on the ‘right side’ of society, and you have the connections, it’s just not something that I want to culturally endorse,” Wat added.
Opinion: Why Thai politics remains a rigged system with little chance of reforms
Others have been forced to seek asylum overseas, as legal charges and even death threats have cascaded down on young activists labelled chung chart – or nation haters – by royalists who decry anyone who questions the monarchy as traitors.
Some of those who have staffed the Thai bureaucracy have also had second thoughts, said Chanapang Pongpiboonkiat, 36, who left her job inside the military to do a PhD in Britain.
“I was in the system [but] I couldn’t do it. I started to feel super burned out and demotivated,” she said. “I just left.”
She said she has friends who have bailed to the United States, Canada, Australia – a brain drain of middle classes who are tired of dead-end politics and want their children to grow up in a different environment.
“For our whole lives, it’s been just ups and downs. With a series of military coups shutting down new players in the political arena. It’s really sad because people in their 30s and 40s should be key propellers in the economy … but they have decided to leave.”
Former general Prawit has said this time around things would be different, promising “no coup” if he is in government. Meanwhile, in a rare sit-down with independent Thai media, Prayuth said he would “go home, where else?” if the election did not go his way.
But history urges caution over the prospects of any Thai civilian government lasting the course – only Thaksin has completed a full term.
With a wry smile, Move Forward leader Pita said the persistent mention of coups and dissolutions were a “red flag” for the country.
“But I’m not nervous,” he said, despite knowing that political parties could be easily destroyed “by outside forces, invisible hands”.
“We have prepared well.”
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