Even to those closely following Thai politics, Pita Limjaroenrat has never come off as an obvious threat to that country’s military-backed government. In fact, he doesn’t really sound like a politician from Southeast Asia at all.
When the Thai parliamentarian first spoke to Foreign Policy at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore last summer, it was just weeks after Thai opposition parties—including Limjaroenrat’s Move Forward Party—had surprised analysts by winning big in Bangkok local elections. Off the back of those victories, Limjaroenrat had just wrapped up a meeting with one of the top officials in the U.S. State Department.
Reflecting on recent gains by Move Forward—a party that is pro-marijuana, pro-same-sex marriage, and pro-reform, which are three rarities in Thai politics—Limjaroenrat, who has served in Thailand’s parliament since 2019, sounded a lot like former U.S. President Barack Obama.
“In short, hope returns,” he said, echoing Obama’s catchphrase. “Hope returns to Thai politics. The politics of possibility is back once again. People are starting to believe in democracy once again.”
Talking like the United States’ 44th president is no accident. Limjaroenrat admits he has borrowed from Obama’s playbook, employing a grassroots-fueled strategy across elections that he learned while shadowing campaign volunteers as a student at Harvard nearly two decades ago. In May’s national elections, this tactic helped Limjaroenrat’s progressive party win the most parliament seats of the 18 parties in the running. Limjaroenrat immediately declared himself Thailand’s new prime minister—a stunning result that sent shockwaves through the region and also raised questions. Most important, whether the Thai military would really allow a reformer to take power.
Limjaroenrat celebrates as he arrives for a news conference following Thailand’s general election at the headquarters of the Move Forward Party in Bangkok on May 15. Sirachai Arunrugstichai/Getty Images
Viewed in a certain light, Limjaroenrat is a typically pragmatic, suit-wearing politician. When students staged mass sit-ins in 2020 demanding major reform, for instance, he courted them without fully backing them. Nor did he share their wish to ditch the monarchy. (While Thailand’s politics for the past several decades have been characterized by a series of military governments, the generals still have to kiss the ring: The monarchy has proven the kingmaker in restoring civilian rule on multiple occasions.)
“He clearly wants to be seen as a unifying figure, a moderate,” Aaron Connelly, who leads research on Southeast Asian political change and foreign policy at the Institute of International Strategic Studies (IISS), said of Limjaroenrat, whose toughest hurdle is yet to come.
Limjaroenrat has formed an ad hoc coalition to govern Thailand, but it is still short of a majority in parliament. He can only ascend to the office of prime minister if he garners enough support in the House of Representatives—and the military-appointed Senate—in a vote scheduled for August. Then there’s also the into whether he was allowed to run for office while holding shares in media companies. Even if in the end he can’t break through, though, Limjaroenrat has mobilized a younger generation that is hungry for change.
In Thailand, a country ruled mostly by military juntas since Japanese troops left at the end of World War II, Limjaroenrat and his electoral success still represents a tectonic shift. Connelly and other experts see him as the possible progenitor of Southeast Asia’s greatest swing toward Western-style democracy in over a generation, since the resignation of Indonesia’s authoritarian president a quarter-century ago.
Limjaroenrat himself, amid uncertainty over his political future at the Shangri-La last June, projected resolve. “People are starting to say, hey, the election can help me out if I really participate in politics, if I go out and vote,” he said. “And that’s something that’s fresh because it hasn’t happened in the last decade.”
Members of the Thai military line up before casting their votes during the general election at a polling station in Bangkok on May 14. Chaiwat Subprasom/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Hours after that interview with Limjaroenrat, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was whisked to Thailand on the first visit by an American cabinet-level official in three years. It was a U.S. effort to make nice with a Bangkok regime that had been chided for democratic backsliding and was turning more to China, including on weapons purchases.
Austin’s motorcade wound through busy traffic circles flanked by billboards, several stories tall, of Thailand’s 70-year-old monarch King Vajiralongkorn and his predecessors. Though street protests have become a regular occurrence in Thailand, the crime of insulting the king, known as lèse-majesté, remains loosely interpreted and harshly enforced.
Thai politics has for half a century followed a push-and-pull pattern: left-wing movements, many of them led by university students, pushing the country to liberalize; and the military pulling Thailand back toward more authoritarian rule, sometimes violently. As recently as last November, Thai police used rubber bullets to disperse protesters at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in Bangkok. In 2020, protests in response to a court ruling dissolving the pro-democracy Future Forward party were mostly peaceful, said Connelly, the IISS expert, but more unrest is expected. Political experts anticipate that young Thais will return to the streets soon, especially since the current, military-backed Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who finished third in this year’s election behind Limjaroenrat and opposition party Pheu Thai, does not appear willing to give up an iron grip on power attained in a 2014 coup.
Will these protests be peaceful, as in 2020—or will they resemble protests crushed by military violence in 2010? Those followed then-Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s decision to ban political parties and form a coalition government without popular support and resulted in the military killing 91 people as it broke up protest encampments. Worse still would be if the unrest mirrored the bloody Black May crackdowns of 1992, led by the military junta of Gen. Suchinda Kraprayoon, which ended only when the king intervened.
Even Limjaroenrat has questioned how far the military-backed government is willing to cede power. “I’m not sure how much power or wealth concentration they are willing to give up,” he said when we spoke again on Zoom last December. He was in his Bangkok home that he shares with his 6-year-old daughter.
Below the monarchy and the military junta is a system of notional democracy: 500 seats, in the parliament’s lower house, elected by the people. It’s notional, because in practice, Prayuth’s government has veto power over most decisions parliament can make. As Limjaroenrat put it, the military is “smart enough to allow elections, but they know how to control everything.” It does this by stacking Thailand’s constitutional court with loyalists, disbanding opposition parties, paying off election committee members, and appointing members of the Senate, the country’s upper house. In this way, Limjaroenrat said, “they have various ways that it’s almost like a quiet coup without having tanks on the street to make sure that they remain in power all the time.”
A supporter of the Move Forward Party poses for a photo with an image of Limjaroenrat in Bangkok on May 12.Sirachai Arunrugstichai/Getty Images
Limjaroenrat has ideas on how to reclaim more power for the people. His was a political education that came on the streets of U.S. cities. Studying at the University of Texas in Austin for a year-and-a-half during the 2000 presidential election, Limjaroenrat observed the basics of candidate walks, polling, and campaign management.
“That really shaped me as a politician,” he said. “I walked with them. I listened to them making phone calls, knocking on doors.” After graduation, he returned to Asia, first to work for the Boston Consulting Group and then to run his family’s debt-ridden rice bran oil business following his father’s death. Back in Thailand, he “introduced people to the on-the-ground, grassroots level of volunteering,” he said.
When Limjaroenrat returned to the United States for joint degrees from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, the 2008 presidential election had gripped campuses. Many of his classmates were volunteering for then-candidate Obama, and some later took administration jobs. In the meantime, dealing with bouts of epilepsy and seizures, Limjaroenrat learned of medical cannabis and began taking regular flights from Boston to Kingston, Jamaica, where marijuana was legal. Naturally, he found a political dimension in those sojourns. “I went to Bob Marley’s birthplace, so I saw the tourists, and how they taxed all of this money to build better schools and hospitals,” he recalled.
Returning home for a second time after graduation, Limjaroenrat joined the Future Forward Party in 2018 and became a member of Thailand’s parliament the following year. Future Forward was an upstart party that called for reining in the military’s political power. It also championed an Obama-like community organizing strategy by using voter data to help prioritize districts, which helped the party pick up 30 seats in 2019. When the military-backed Supreme Court dissolved Future Forward in 2020, Limjaroenrat jumped from number four on the party’s ranks of members to the undisputed leader, partly on the strength of a speech telling the government to renew focus on agricultural policies to supercharge economic growth.
Limjaroenrat established a party, called Move Forward, from the ashes of the Supreme Court ruling on Future Forward. He faced an uphill battle to win support. Even after allowing elections again in 2019—they had been suspended for five years after the coup—Prayuth had mobilized the entire Thai state to keep his military-backed party in power. His government has a monopoly on spectator sports such as boxing and horse racing and also controls Thailand’s beverage, banking, and retail sectors. To fight back, Limjaroenrat drew on U.S. grassroots political tactics.
“We train them in route management, each district, which streets do I go to, the data that is needed, the polling of the message,” Limjaroenrat said. “The things that American politicians do—but in Thai politics, it was never the case [before].”
Limjaroenrat greets supporters during a celebratory parade after winning the most seats in the Thai general election in Bangkok on May 15.Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images
In the crackdown on the 2020 demonstrators, Limjaroenrat mobilized to try to free more than 250 protesters, including minors, who were taken into police custody without trial or access to lawyers. One protester, a 17-year-old girl, went on hunger strike in prison for 60 days. Limjaroenrat succeeded in getting her freed about two weeks later. He used his powers as a member of parliament to allow bail for others who were charged. Limjaroenrat is proud that Move Forward’s plans to reform Thailand’s lèse-majesté law that makes criticism of King Vajiralongkorn a jailable crime have already softened the taboo of speaking about the crown in public.
“That’s the reason for the existence of our party,” Limjaroenrat said. “Not to win elections and have as many votes as possible, but to dominate ideas.”
Limjaroenrat is also calling for a very specific policy change: a devolution of power away from the military. “If you don’t demilitarize and take the military out of the picture,” he said, “it’s not going to it’s not going to get Thailand ready for the 21st century.”
Yet while he’s happy to speak frankly about the military’s outsize role in politics, Limjaroenrat stops short of criticizing the monarchy. He maintains his aim is to undertake reforms with velvet gloves—all in service of making sure that Thailand’s monarchy is ready for the 21st century.
“If there’s any reform or any adaptation that’s required, we want to be able to do it with maturity, with politeness, and with discretion, just to make sure that Thailand remains democratic, and under monarchy, just like how we have been in the past,” he said.
A protester shouts beside another making the three-finger salute during a demonstration in Bangkok on Nov. 14, 2021, after a Thai court ruled that speeches by protest leaders calling for royal reforms amounted to a bid to overthrow the country’s monarchy. Jack Taylor/AFP via Getty Images
By the time the latest round of protests died down in November 2021, and after the public had endured COVID-19 restrictions that the opposition saw as a means of preventing further demonstrations, Move Forward had begun to make inroads. Dozens of reforming members of parliament had followed Limjaroenrat to his new party. Its 300-policy platform was perhaps the most ambitious policy reform agenda ever brought forth in Thai politics. Amplified by its influential presence on social media, Move Forward was quietly winning over change-minded voters— in particular, Thai youth.
“[Limjaroenrat] and Move Forward has a completely different approach to doing politics in Thailand, even different than Pheu Thai”—a more established opposition party—“which in many ways remains in the old model of Thai politics in terms of relying pretty heavily on patronage,” said Tyrell Haberkorn, Southeast Asian studies professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Limjaroenrat has succeeded in bringing in not only the student movement, but independents attracted to the broad notion of change.
“He’s kind of a mirror on which people can project their own hopes and aspirations,” said Duncan McCargo, political science professor and director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. “I think that’s how to understand Pita. It’s less about what he actually says and does than about people’s need to have someone on whom to project what it is that they want Thailand to become.”
The chance for a referendum on Thailand’s illiberal democracy came sooner than anyone might have expected. In late fall 2022, coup rumors were swirling in Bangkok. Prayuth, whose term as prime minister was expiring, picked up the remnants of his old party and announced plans to run under a new so-called United Thai Nation Party. Then the king himself got sick of the political instability and dissolved Thailand’s lower house of parliament in March 2023. An election would be held in May.
A drumbeat of civil society organizations warned that the independent elections commission, which said it would not release voting data in real time, could not be trusted. So it came as a shock when Limjaroenrat’s Move Forward broke through with the most seats, followed by Pheu Thai in second place. The ruling Prayuth and his United Thai Nation Party was a distant third.
Limjaroenrat quickly moved to close ranks even before Thailand’s messy coalition politics were sorted out. He staged an elaborate victory parade down the streets of central Bangkok, past the gold-framed portraits of King Vajiralongkorn, with his supporters decked out in Move Forward’s bright orange. “I am ready to be the prime minister for all, whether you agree with me or disagree with me,” he said in a victory speech, which echoed Obama’s 2008 election-night pledge to also be a president for voters who hadn’t backed him.
Limjaroenrat waves to supporters while holding his daughter at a Move Forward rally in Bangkok on May 12.Sirachai Arunrugstichai/Getty Images
In a move defying the military establishment, Limjaroenrat then announced a six-party alliance that would form a majority in the lower house of parliament on a platform of two dozen issues, including restoring democracy, allowing same-sex marriage, and reforming the justice system. That quick declaration of victory “allowed him to basically dare the senators, dare the military, dare the establishment, and stop him from becoming prime minister,” Connelly said.
But experts aren’t convinced Limjaroenrat has the votes in parliament. He has claimed just over 300 seats, about 70 short of the threshold to form a government. He needs to either attract another partner from the currently non-coalition parties or secure votes from about 64 senators in the upper house, all of whom belong to the military establishment.
And the military still has cards to play, in the form of the election probe. Limjaroenrat reportedly held shares in media companies even after the May election; this has led political activists to push for him to be barred under election laws (Limjaroenrat subsequently sold the shares and said he was confident he would be cleared, and Move Forward has alleged that the move is part of a preelection plot to keep the candidate from taking office).
“There is a military junta backed government that’s doing everything to make sure that the election is not free and fair, such as gerrymandering, just such as using public servants to their advantage in the way you do things,” Limjaroenrat said on our Zoom call in December. “And obviously, Southeast Asian politics are never crystal clean anyways.”
What’s clear is that the Thai people are no longer happy with the status quo. Haberkorn, the Southeast Asian studies professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, predicts that if Limjaroenrat is denied the premiership, mass protests will most likely involve people of all demographics across the country—not just concentrated in Bangkok or among one demographic of voters.
“It’s really a testament to a complete political realignment that’s taking place in Thailand more generally,” said McCargo, the University of Copenhagen professor. “Something really profound is starting to happen. It’s all unraveling.”
