When Thailand’s Constitutional Court yesterday ordered the disbanding of the largest party in the country’s parliament, few observers of Thai politics were particularly surprised. Back in January, the Court had ordered the progressive Move Forward Party (MFP) to stop campaigning for the amendment of the country’s lese-majeste law, saying that it amounted to an attempt to overturn Thailand’s system of constitutional monarchy. When the Court in April accepted a petition from the Election Commission seeking the party’s dissolution on this basis, it was hard to see the nine judges ruling any other way.
In a unanimous decision on Wednesday that cited the January ruling, the judges said Move Forward’s lese-majeste reform promise had put the royal institution in conflict with the people. “The action of the accused is therefore an action that may antagonise the democratic system with the king as the head of state,” they ruled, as per Reuters.
Still, the disbanding of the MFP, and the banning of its senior leaders from politics for 10 years, is dismaying and demoralizing news for those hoping to see more accountable government in Thailand. Move Forward won more votes than any other party at last year’s general election, campaigning on a progressive platform that included pledges to end military conscription, break up business monopolies, and reform Article 112 of the Thai penal code, as the lese-majeste law is known. The fact that this was popular with voters, including in traditionally conservative Bangkok, suggested a considerable popular appetite for change.
However, the military-installed Senate effectively blocked the party from power when they refused to approve then-party leader Pita Limjaroenrat as prime minister, largely due to the party’s Article 112 reform pledge. Then the legal institutional machinery began to whir into motion, with royalist legal activists filing various petitions against the MFP.
With its unanimous 9-0 ruling, the Court effectively invalidated the votes of 14 million Thais and extended a pattern of elite intervention in the political sphere, aimed at ring-fencing the royalist-conservative establishment from any serious political challenge. Alongside the military coups d’etat of 2006 and 2014, Move Forward became the ninth party to be disbanded by the courts since 2007. The last of these was its own predecessor, Future Forward, which was dissolved in February 2020 over a campaign funding violation.
In a statement, Matthew Wheeler of the International Crisis Group said that these episodes “illustrate how Thailand’s constitution drafters have succeeded in empowering watchdog agencies and the judiciary, staffed with unelected officials appointed by conservative institutions, to discipline elected officials that they regard as a threat to the status quo.” Move Forward was the ninth party to be banned since 2007.
Where to now for Thailand’s progressive political movement? Given the predictability of the ruling, the MFP has long prepared a contingency plan. Hours after the ruling, the MFP’s leaders announced that the surviving 143 lawmakers would form a new party on Friday, as they did after Future Forward was outlawed. The party’s MPs can hold on to their seats if they change parties within the next 60 days. According to media reports, they will likely reassemble under the banner of the existing Thinkakhao Chaovilai Party, to avoid the protracted red tape involved in forming a new one.
“We will not abandon our dream and our mission and duty that was tasked to us,” deputy leader Sirikanya Tansakul told reporters, according to Reuters. “As long as the people are alongside us and support us to change this country, we will continue forward.”
With Move Forward’s banned leaders exercising influence from behind the scenes, the new party can expect to do well. The dissolution of Future Forward in early 2020 helped catalyze a wave of large youth-led, anti-government protests that took place in 2020 and early 2021, before being halted by COVID-19 restrictions and weaponized Article 112 prosecutions.
For many young Thais, who had come of political age since the military takeover of 2014, the disbanding of Future Forward, which had placed third in the general election of 2019, had a radicalizing effect. For the first time, notably, the protests involved open critiques of the Thai monarchy, and its role in sustaining the country’s dense concentrations of wealth and power. Despite the efforts of the royalist conservative establishment, this issue now appears to have become a part of the broader political debate in Thailand.
As Shawn Crispin of Asia Times noted in his post-mortem of yesterday’s decision, the ruling marked “the first time a court has banned a political party specifically for challenging royal power, pulling the monarchy into the political fray in an unprecedented way.”
It is therefore fair to expect that a similar degree of anger and further radicalization will result from this week’s ruling, as well as from its clockwork predictability. Prior to the ruling, Pita Limjaroenrat told Bloomberg that there would be “quite a political inferno here in Thailand” if the party were disbanded. A return to street politics in the coming weeks and months cannot be ruled out, especially in Bangkok, now a bastion of support for Move Forward. However, ex-MFP officials themselves may be cautious about encouraging protests. In an open letter last week, Pita expressed caution about encouraging a return to the street. He said that Thailand is locked in a “long-term contest” against conservative interests and that “Thailand’s path to greater democracy lies in peaceful transitions through credible elections.”
In a social media post after yesterday’s ruling, Move Forward MP Rangsiman Rome expressed confidence that the upward trajectory from Future Forward to Move Forward would carry the new party to a decisive victory at the next general election. “No matter what our new party’s name is, in 2027, the whole country will be orange,” he posted.
At the same time, yesterday’s ruling was a reminder that the conservative establishment has the means and the desire to forestall any meaningful challenge to the status quo, and does not care a whit about the result of “credible elections.” It can be expected to take steps to prevent Move Forward’s successor party from prevailing in the 2027 election. Where legal and administrative measures fail, there is always the political reset option of a military coup, and a resort to unvarnished repression.
Although there is nothing inevitable about the victory of the progressive movement, yesterday’s ruling seems to point in the direction of greater political frustration and conflict in Thailand over the medium term. A force can only be held in compressed containment for so long before it bursts forth in some fashion, with consequences that are hard to predict.