Thai election winner says party ban would ‘turbocharge’ calls for change

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The leader of Thailand’s election-winning party who was subsequently blocked from power has said that the threatened dissolution of his party would “turbocharge” the progressive movement seeking to challenge the country’s military-royalist elite.

Harvard-educated Pita Limjaroenrat’s Move Forward party came first in parliamentary elections last year, but it was blocked from power by unelected senators appointed by the country’s formerly ruling military junta.

The party now faces possible dissolution — and Pita himself a decade-long ban from public office — over its most controversial campaign pledge: to amend Thailand’s harsh lèse majesté law, which criminalises insults to the south-east Asian country’s monarch and his immediate family.

In an interview with the Financial Times in Seoul, the South Korean capital, Pita, 43, said he remained the “people’s choice” for the premiership and expressed hope of a fair hearing from Thailand’s constitutional court, which could deliver a verdict from Monday on whether to break up the party.

The court ruled earlier this year that the party’s intention to reform the lèse majesté law amounted to an attempt to overthrow Thailand’s political system. A separate petition with the anti-graft commission over the same issue could see Pita banned from politics for life.

Pita said it was “disproportionate” to accuse him of insurrection and treason, arguing that his party was seeking “proportionality of [the] law between protection of the monarchy as well as freedom of speech”.

But he argued that his party’s dissolution would only be “a short term hiccup” that “in the long term it will turbocharge our progressive ideas”. He cited the Future Forward party — an antecedent of Move Forward that was itself dissolved by the constitutional court in 2020 — to show the opposition was gaining ground, from 81 seats in the 2019 election to 151 last year.

“We have proven in the past five years that our progressive ideas are the core substance of the movement,” he said, rather than “the name . . . [or] the leader of the party”.

Thailand’s lèse majesté law, also known as Article 112 of the penal code, is among the strictest in the world, carrying a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. At least 272 people have been prosecuted for lèse majesté offences since 2020, according to Thai Lawyers for Human Rights, but calls for its reform have proved a red line for Thailand’s royalist establishment.

This week, 31-year-old Move Forward lawmaker Chonthicha Jangrew was sentenced to two years in prison for insulting the monarchy.

Pita also noted the case of Netiporn “Bung” Sanesangkhom, a 28-year-old democracy activist who died last month after a hunger strike while in pre-trial detention on charges that included insulting the monarchy.

“If we [in the Thai parliament] were allowed to debate maturely, transparently and with respect about the lèse majesté in terms of its proportionality . . . I feel that if that space was available then it will not force someone, especially juveniles and the younger generation, to choose methods that harm themselves and their loved ones,” he said.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a professor of political science at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, said Move Forward’s dissolution was a foregone conclusion. “Other reforms are negotiable but the monarchy has become sacrosanct,” he said.

Pita also criticised Pheu Thai, the party of populist former prime minister and royalist bête noire Thaksin Shinawatra, for entering into a coalition with military-backed parties, thereby blocking Pita’s party from power.

“The way [Pheu Thai] got into power . . . makes it very hard for them to exercise that power,” he said, suggesting that Pheu Thai, traditionally Thailand’s largest opposition group, would struggle to retain the support of reform-minded voters.

Pita added that as a long-standing treaty ally of the US, Thailand would like to see Washington deliver more in areas beyond defence and security, including the environment, trade, infrastructure and the digital economy. The Philippines recently made a similar call for the US to step up trade and investment to counter China’s growing influence in south-east Asia.

“We have been allies for almost 200 years, but it [should not be] just about defence,” he said. “I want to expand or recalibrate [the relationship].”

Additional reporting by Mercedes Ruehl in Singapore