Srettha will hope that largesse in the form of new cash transfers and subsidy programs will take voters’ minds off Pheu Thai’s political lifeline to pro-junta parties despite the electorate’s clear repudiation of them at the May election. But the more it leans on such populist measures, the greater the tension with conservatives, whose concerns about Pheu Thai’s cavalier approach to policy design and public finance became part of the pretext for coups against it in 2006 and 2014.
It seems likely that Srettha’s government will be marked by internal infighting over economic and social policies and the extent of its ambitions to appease pro-democracy voters with institutional reforms. Given the fragmented 11-party parliamentary coalition underpinning the government, there is also plenty of space for speculation about the potential for its collapse.
On social media, commentators were quick to draw parallels between the Thai situation and that of Malaysia, where Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim governs in coalition with the UMNO, the cornerstone of the old Barisan Nasional regime that ruled the country for decades.
Pro-reform message
Anwar can endure the ire of voters disappointed by his soft-pedalling of reforms to keep this alliance stable because his government is not threatened on its progressive flank but rather from the racist and Islamist right.
Srettha doesn’t have that advantage. All the signs suggest that Move Forward’s resolutely pro-reform message will make it the home of voters disillusioned with Pheu Thai. Move Forward just enjoyed an important swing towards it in a byelection in Thailand’s deep south, historically a stronghold of the conservative Democrat Party.
Having been suspended from parliament on dubious legal grounds, Pita has resigned as party leader, allowing for one of Move Forward’s other MPs to emerge as the leader of the opposition.
Thailand’s stability now hinges on how the new government deals with an assertive pro-democratic opposition, whose appeal, as shown in the May election, transcends the country’s deep geographic and class divides. Political competition is increasingly structured according to stark reformist-establishment divide.
Indeed, one of the reasons progressive outrage at Pheu Thai’s selling-out hasn’t resulted in large-scale protests is that their disapproval can still be channelled through the party system.
That only works so long as Move Forward offers them that channel. The incentive for conservative hardliners to crack down on Move Forward will only intensify in the lead-up to the constitutional expiry of the unelected Senate’s role in the appointment of a prime minister next year, which would give Move Forward another shot at the premiership in the event of another election or a no-confidence vote in Srettha.
The anger that would greet a ban of Move Forward – the fate of its predecessor party, Future Forward – would be nothing short of explosive.
What makes the situation deeply uncertain is that the hardline elements of Thailand’s royalist-militarist elite have an occasional interest in instability if it can provide the pretext for extra-constitutional efforts to seize power.
At the centre of Thailand’s tragic inability to bed down democracy is this establishment modus operandi, which resembles a racket in the classic sense of the term: creating a problem – political instability – that they are strategically positioned to “resolve”.
