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Thailand’s Pheu Thai Party Voices Dissolution Fears Over Winning Election

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Thailand's Pheu Thai Party Voices Dissolution Fears Over Winning Election

As Thailand’s largest opposition party travels across Thailand on the campaign trail the Pheu Thai is consider the political cost of victory in the May 14 election: The danger of dissolution for alleged breaching election laws.

Following the dissolution of another pro-democratic party after a remarkable rise in the 2019 elections due to violations of election laws, recent discussions at Pheu Thai’s strategy meetings touched on the need for “political insurance” to deal with such threats, according to multiple sources within the party.

“We cannot underestimate our adversaries [as they try] every which way to prevent us from forming a government,” said Pichai Naripthaphan, a former energy minister and vice chairman of the Pheu Thai party’s strategy committee, to Nikkei Asia.

He stated that the party requires at least 251 of the 500 seats up for grabs to develop “an electoral mandate to deal with this threat,” and that it aspires for 310 seats for more political security and to strengthen its hand in the final behind-the-scenes bargaining to form the next government after the elections.

Former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the exiled patriarch of the country’s most powerful political clan, will field 392 candidates for the 400 constituency seats and 100 candidates for the 100 “party-list” seats based on votes cast for each party.

According to opinion polls, the party is ahead of other major parties such as Palang Pracharath and Bhumjaithai. A poll conducted by the National Institute of Development Administration in early March found the party to have 49% support, which was echoed a few weeks later by a Suan Dusit Rajabhat University poll, which found Pheu Thai to have 46% support.

According to a report by Thai Enquirer, a local online news portal, a recent survey by Santi Baan, the special section of Thai police, predicted Pheu Thai will win 265 seats, a four-fold advantage over the next party, Bhumjaithai.

But there are threats hanging over Pheu Thai’s fate, which might result in the party’s dissolution under the country’s legal system.

Pheu Thai and Thaksin

At stake are Thaksin’s comments about Thai politics on the social networking site Clubhouse, as well as the participation of Nattawut Saikua, a fiery leader of the Pro-Thaksin “Red Shirts” political movement who served a jail term and is barred from politics, as a speaker at a Pheu Thai event.

Thaksin and Nattawut have both been accused of breaking Thailand’s peculiar election laws, which prohibit “outsiders” from participating in party politics. Members of the country’s royalist-military hard-right political camp have filed complaints against them with the elections commission, a supposedly neutral agency.

Thaksin and Nattawut may run afoul of the commission’s track record of generously exercising its powers and interpreting election rules as it sees suitable, as it did during the last elections in 2019. The commission’s targets are facing lawsuits at the Constitutional Court, another ostensibly independent body that has given harsher decisions against the pro-democracy side.

The results must be approved by the elections commission within 60 days of the voting. However, even after it has approved the results, the EC has the authority to pursue any political party in the new parliament based on any “new information” it receives regarding MPs allegedly breaching election regulations. As a result, even if Pheu Thai wins the election, it will face similar threats.

Elections commission a stacked deck

The elections commission, whose members Prime Minister Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha had chosen, used a previously undisclosed calculation to award parliamentary seats to minor, pro-military parties shortly after the votes concluded in 2019. It also dissolved the Future Forward Party, a newly created pro-youth party that came third on the strength of its pro-democracy agenda, for breaking election laws. This intervention paved the way for Prayuth, whose party finished second, to create his pro-military coalition.

The National Institute of Development Administration’s most recent opinion poll, released over the weekend, revealed that Pheu Thai received a 47.2% favourable rating, nearly on par with the March poll that identified it as the front-runner, indicating that its supporters were not abandoning the party due to such dissolution threats.

Nonetheless, senior Thai political watchers agree that Pheu Thai’s concern is not unfounded, given Thailand’s political history over the last two decades. Thaksin’s political parties have won every election since 2001, but they have all been demolished not by the ballot box, but by a powerful network of royalist-military institutions.

The anti-democracy actions have varied from two military coups in 2006 and 2014, to a “judicial coup” in December 2008, when a court delivered a hasty judgement to bring down a pro-Thaksin administration, to the dissolution of three pro-Thaksin parties.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a senior political scientist at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, believes a “repeat of the charade” is still possible, and Pheu Thai has reason to be concerned. “They have various buttons to push, and we know these referee agencies are biassed,” Thitinan remarked, referring to the elections commission.

Diplomats in Bangkok are paying attention to these “abnormal factors,” which Thailand has been unable to explain. “How big the margin of victory will be relevant in any attempts against Pheu Thai,” noted a Western diplomat. “Will they take a risk to overthrow a clear democratic mandate?”

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