Officials and lawmakers from Thailand’s Move Forward Party (MFP) today launched a new successor party with the aim of a victory at the next election in 2027, following the MFP’s dissolution by the Constitutional Court earlier this week.
MFP officials and parliamentarians announced the formation of the People’s Party in an event at the Thai Summit Tower in Bangkok this afternoon, after choosing the party’s new leader and members of the executive board.
According to Bloomberg, Natthaphong Ruengpanyawut, 37, a former IT executive and two-time MP who was named the party’s leader, said that its “mission from now on is to create a government of change in 2027.”
The party also chose a youthful executive board that includes Sarayut Jailak, a close friend of Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, the former leader of the banned Future Forward party, as the secretary general. Even before the official announcement, the Thai name of the new party (#พรรคประชาชน) began trending on X, appended to messages of support. The party said that it is already accepting new party members with the initial target of gaining 100,000 members.
On Wednesday, the Constitutional Court ordered the dissolution of Move Forward and banned 11 of its leaders, including former leader Pita Limjaroenrat, from politics for 10 years. The court claimed that the party violated the constitution by proposing an amendment of the country’s harsh lese-majeste law, which criminalizes criticisms of the monarchy and royal family.
While expected, the court’s decision has been widely criticized by Thai democratic activists and foreign governments alike. The MFP won a plurality of votes at last year’s general election, on a progressive platform that involved pledges to break up business monopolies, abolish military conscription, and reform the lese-majeste law, but was blocked from taking power by the opposition of the military-appointed Senate.
The People’s Party has been explicitly designed as a proxy for the banned MFP, and largely replicates its reformist – and in Thailand’s context, radical – agenda. The party’s logo is an upside-down orange triangle closely resembling those of Move Forward and its predecessor Future Forward, which was also banned over a campaign financing violation in early 2020.
In a Facebook post announcing its name and new logo, the party wrote, in Bloomberg’s translation, that “the most sacred and enduring institution in a democratic political system is the people, who hold the highest power in governing the country.” It said that its logo “represents the lifting of the nation’s roots over rulers,” its three sides representing “liberty, equality and fraternity.” It signed off with what appears to be the party’s slogan: “by the people, for the people, building a Thailand where the highest power belongs to the people.”
The new party’s name also has historical resonances that could prove controversial. As the political observer Ken Mathis Lohatepanont noted on X, “People’s Party” is also the English name that is commonly used for the Khana Ratsadon, an elite group of French-educated civil servants and soldiers that launched the 1932 revolution. “I highly doubt that’s a coincidence,” Lohatepanont wrote.
The bloodless revolution, which overthrew King Prajadhipok and abruptly curtailed nearly 700 years of absolute monarchical rule, is closely associated with the student protest movement of 2020 and 2021, which first saw open criticisms of the monarchy and its position in Thailand’s political economy. The fact that the two parties’ names are different in Thai may provide the People’s Party some plausible deniability, but royalists are certain to zero-in on the parallel, and Lohatepanont said that there was “a lot of potential for this to become very, very, controversial.”
Even though the party claims that it intends to work within the current constitutional order, and it “adheres to the democratic system with the King as Head of State,” its reference to the people as the “highest power” could be seen as a challenge to the monarchy’s elevated position. Crucially, Natthaphong said that the People’s Party remains committed to amending the lese-majeste law, in order to prevent its misuse as a political tool, even though it plans to proceed cautiously.
The dissolution of the MFP extended a pattern of elite intervention in the political sphere, aimed at protecting the royalist-conservative establishment from any serious political challenge. However, the very predictability of the Constitutional Court’s decision granted the MFP ample time to prepare a contingency plan and ensure a smooth transition to its new identity.
To get around the bureaucratic hurdles involved in establishing a new party from scratch, the former MFP officials have used the tiny Thinkakhao Chaovilai Party as a vehicle for the new party. Leaders of Thinkakhao Chaovilai, which has no elected representatives, attended today’s meeting and agreed to an arrangement whereby the party changes its name and logo to that of the People’s Party. While there was some talk that other parties might seek to “poach” MFP parliamentarians, all 143 of the party’s elected lawmakers have reportedly agreed to join the People’s Party.
The party is confident that in its new guise, it can continue the upward trajectory that saw it prevail at last year’s election. At the 2019 general election, Future Forward came in third, winning 17.34 percent of the vote and 81 of the 500 seats in the House of Representatives. In 2023, Move Forward more than doubled this to 37.99 percent and 151 seats. (Six of these MPs were among those banned by the Constitutional Court on Wednesday; two more were expelled from the party last year in connection with a sexual assault scandal.)
Public opinion polls conducted since suggest that support for the party has continued to grow. In June, the NIDA published the results of a poll showing that the MFP was the preferred party of 49.2 percent of respondents, compared to just 16.85 percent for Pheu Thai, the largest party in the ruling coalition. Pita Limjaroenrat, the party’s prime ministerial candidate ahead of the 2023 election, was the most popular choice for prime minister with 45.5 percent support, compared to just 12.85 percent for Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin of the Pheu Thai party.
In a social media post after Wednesday’s Constitutional Court ruling, Move Forward MP Rangsiman Rome expressed confidence that the new party could score 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 wrote.