Thailand’s parliament will convene to select the country’s new prime minister on July 13, house speaker Wan Muhamad Noor Matha has announced.
The Wednesday announcement came a day after the 79-year-old Wan Noor, the leader of the Prachachart Party, was selected as House speaker, which handed him the duty of calling for a joint sitting of the country’s bicameral legislature to vote on the next prime minister. A second round vote, if the first does not produce a conclusive outcome, will be held on July 19, Wan Noor said.
The vote will mark the culmination of two months of political maneuvering since the general election on May 14, which saw a stunning victory for the progressive Move Forward Party (MFP), which won 151 of the 500 seats in the House of Representatives. Together with the Pheu Thai Party (PTP), the electoral vehicle of fugitive former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the MFP hopes to spell an end to nearly a decade of rule by the military and military-backed parties, which performed very poorly at the polls.
However, while the date has now been set, it remains as unclear as it did in May whether the eight-party coalition led by the MFP will be able to secure the selection of its leader, Pita Limjaroenrat, as Thailand’s next prime minister. The reason, as I’ve noted at length previously, is the role played by the unelected Senate, whose 250 members will also cast a vote for the prime minister.
The Senate’s participation raises the threshold needed to form a government from 251 seats, a basic majority in the House of Representatives (and the amount needed to select Wan Noor as the house speaker), to 376. The MFP’s coalition currently holds 312 seats, and while some senators have indicated that they are open to supporting Pita’s candidacy, it remains unlikely that the party will win over the 64 senators that it needs to surmount the threshold.
The MFP, and Pita himself, say they are confident that they have the requisite support, but if they fall short, as seems likely, the outcome is hard to predict. The MFP says that if Pita does not secure enough support on the first ballot, that he might succeed on the second or third, due to mounting public pressure on the Senate to support the people’s will. One possible outcome might be that conservative forces will encourage the PTP, which came second in the election with 141 seats, to break from the MFP and form a new government with conservative and military-aligned parties, and relegate the victorious MFP to the opposition.
Either way, as Thitinan Pongsudhirak wrote in the Bangkok Post today, “if most [Senators] do not vote for Mr Pita, or even Srettha Thavisin of Pheu Thai, unless the party splits from its larger partner, then the ministerial vote could be drawn out.”
Even if the vote comes off, and Pita succeeds Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha next week, he faces a number of complaints filed by conservative activists. These include the accusation that Pita ran for office knowing that he was ineligible due to his ownership of shares in a media company, which is banned under the constitution, and another hair-splitting complaint that he accepted a complimentary ticket to a women’s volleyball game. Any of these complaints could potentially derail Pita’s prime ministership.
In a typical democracy, Pita would long have taken office and begun the process of implementing his party’s policy agenda. But in Thailand’s current system, purposefully limited by the Constitution drafted by the military government in 2017, there are any number of traps and tripwires to prevent an anti-establishment party from getting into power, or failing that, governing effectively.
All of this speaks to the establishment’s fear of the MFP’s ambitious agenda, which includes pledges to abolish military conscription, break up powerful economic monopolies, and legalize same-sex marriage. Most controversially, the party has also pledged to amend Article 112 of the Thai criminal code, otherwise known as the lese-majeste law, which bans criticisms of the king and the royal family, and effectively muzzles open discussion of the central institution of Thai politics.
“What we are seeing from this election and its aftermath is that Thai politics is now all about the proposed reforms of the established institutions that hold real power in this country,” Thitinan wrote. “They and their myriad appendages, beneficiaries and vested interests are unwilling to concede or compromise without a fight, through and through and time and again.”