Thailand: Still a long way to democracy
When we think about Thailand, we tend to think about the crystal-clear waters of Maya Bay, the busy streets of Bangkok, legal marijuana, muay thai, sex tourism, and exotic food. In fact, Thailand is one of the world’s leading travel destinations and is well-known for the variety of experiences it can offer, but did you know that over the last 90 years the country has seen 13 successful coups d’état?
To Western eyes, it is puzzling how Thailand has been able to grow its tourist sector and its economy while experiencing high levels of political instability. Nevertheless, with a development model similar to other Asian states, it has flourished economically while maintaining an authoritarian rule.
To understand better the Thai path towards a fast-developing economy, it is useful to go back to the start of the Thai legal path to modernity. Inheriting his father’s modernizing project, King Rama V implemented reforms in the legal system in 1868, to foster development and reject the risk of Western colonization. In fact, at the time, Thailand was surrounded by colonies exercising political and economic pressure on the country to liberalize. At the time, the priority of the monarch was to preserve the Thai identity while implementing reforms allowing him to deal with the colonized neighbors. Rama V’s legal reforms were designed to foster the Buddhist ethic and social order rather than a transplantation of the liberalizing Western norms. They strengthened Thailand’s bureaucratic and military apparatus, shaping a ruling class composed of legal scholars and military elite members formed in the same Academies.
After a first period of relative stability, in 1932, the country’s economic conditions deteriorated due to the Great Depression. Amid this critical economic condition, a right-wing nationalist general and a left-wing law professor led a successful coup that brought an end to the absolute monarchy and led to the drafting of the first Thai Constitution. The professor’s Marxist ideology with the State as the primary economic actor, combined with the general’s authoritarianism, led to a top-down development model that continued to endure under the following authoritarian governments. This development model assimilates Thailand to “the Asian development State”, where the ruling regimes prioritize economic growth over democracy and constitutional development.
Even though Thailand's development has not been characterized by political stability and predictability, with its 13 coups d’état and 20 different constitutions, it conceals a mostly invariant power structure that has long maintained its interest in preserving economic growth.
The intentions of the coups d’état and, therefore, of the constitutions drafted under their makers were consistent throughout history. They were always led by the same (military) forces with the objective restoring the nation-religion-monarchy trinity and “Thai-ness traditional values”. The constitutions have indeed been promulgated on the authority and with the consent of the king, not claimed by the people in the expression of their political will, as conceived in Western terms.
The recent political turmoil in the country is not an exception to this cycle of breaking and restoring the power of the military-judiciary elite.
Around the 1990s, with the advancement of the capitalist economy in the country, a low-middle class emerged in urban settings and the emergence of this new class coincided with the demands for modernization and democratization. In this period, the “royal patrimonial state” ruled by the alliance between the pro-sovereign military and the judiciary elites started to be questioned by the people.
To tackle the demands of the emerging class, the businessman Thaksin Shinawatra got into politics with a populist rhetoric that allowed him to gain a lot of consent. His popularity rose during the 1997 economic crisis, which highlighted the fragility of an export-led development model in which the benefits were concentrated and capital-intensive industries did not employ enough workers. As a matter of fact, three-quarters of all Thai households were still outside the manufactured-export sector and worked in rural areas or in the urban informal sector. These peasants were hit hardest by the economic crisis and represented Mr. Thaksin’s electoral pool.
The contrast between the elite and the people led to the rise of two political factions: the Yellow shirts on one side and conservative-minded supporting the traditional military-monarchy rule and Mr. Thaksin’s Red shirts on the other, more liberal-minded and attentive to the economy.
At first, Mr. Thaksin’s promises of economic redistribution and restoration of growth satisfied voters’ expectations despite the lack of democratic reforms, and he was elected Prime Minister in 2001. In 2006, though, protesters from the pro-monarchy faction (the Yellow shirts) took to the streets and the military staged a coup while Mr. Thaksin was in the US for an official visit. The military junta suspended the 1997 constitution, dissolved the Parliament, abolished the Constitutional Court, and quickly drafted a new constitution.
The following instability caused by the Red-Yellow political tensions, with intervals of violent clashes, ultimately translated into the coup of 2014 that brought to life the current Thai constitution (2017) which includes a fully military-appointed Senate.
In 2019, a third party emerged in the Thai political arena, the Future Forward Party, who did not only focus on the economic reforms but openly questioned the nation-religion-monarchy trinity by criticizing the “lese majeste”, a law stating that whoever says anything critical against the monarchy faces 3 to 15 years of prison. The party was dissolved by a Constitutional Court ruling in 2020, followed by youth protests against lese majeste and monarch sovereignty with the motto “#whydoweneedaking?”. Immersed in a globalized environment, young generations have manifested their will to abolish the hierarchical traditional structure that blocks any reform towards a liberal democratic regime. The Future Forward Party changed its name to Move Forward Party and won an outstanding number of seats in the May 2023 elections.
The young reformist leader of the Move Forward party, Pita Limjaroenrat, promised to amend the lese majeste and to implement other major systemic reforms. Nevertheless, the will of the people, expressed during the democratic elections, was not respected and Limjaroenrat was not elected prime minister because the parliamentary majority was insufficient, according to the 2017 Constitution. The young leader also needed 63 votes from the military-appointed Senate, which refused to collaborate.
In the middle of the stalemate caused by the Senate, in August 2023, Mr. Thaksin Shinawatra, returned to Bangkok after a 15-year long self-exile in Germany. Hours after his return, the two traditional opposing parties (the former Mr. Thaksin’s Pheu Thai party and its traditional enemy, the military-backed United Thai Nation) found an agreement and elected Srettha Thavisin, founder of one of the country’s biggest real estate developers, as Prime Minister. Mr. Thaksin was initially jailed but immediately transferred to a luxury hospital, thus raising voices of some form of agreement with the new elites. Just over a week after his admission to the hospital-jail, the King reduced Mr. Thaksin’s prison sentence from eight years to one after the billionaire requested a royal pardon.
Only one year later, the Thai Constitutional Court ordered the dissolution of the Move Forward Party, banning its leader from politics for 10 years. The Move Forward MPs have transferred to another registered party and persist in their role as main opposition in parliament. In the meantime, an unpredictable alliance arose to defeat this new liberal force, Mr. Thaksin’s party and the military conservative party joined their forces.
On August 21, 2024, the Constitutional Court dismissed the prime minister, Srettha Thavisin, for appointing a former lawyer who served jail time as minister. This ruling has been interpreted as a back-room deal between the conservatives and the Pheu Thai party, since only two days later, Mr. Thaksin’s daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, was easily elected to the top position. The removal of Thavisin could also be interpreted as a diversion for the country’s poor economic performance this year, which placed it at the bottom of the Asian markets.
The dismissal of Thavisin and the dissolution of the Move Forward party by the Constitutional Court have been yet another demonstration of the country's inability to move towards a democratic system.
The main obstacle to Thailand’s democratization lies in the elite's ability to control the Constitution, which is not designed to uphold democratic values but is instead built ad hoc to preserve the political power in the hands of the conservative faction.
As demonstrated by the latest events, the conservatives continue to dominate the political landscape, demonstrating their willingness to take any measure necessary to maintain their power, including forming an alliance with their historical adversary, Mr. Thaksin's party. The coalition serves the interests of both parties, enabling the Pheu Thai to advance its economic agenda while eluding political reforms that could undermine the power of the elite.