By Grant Perk, BANGKOK Thailand
Thailand’s main opposition parties easily bested other contenders with virtually all the votes counted from Sunday’s general election, fulfilling many voters’ hopes that the balloting would serve as a pivotal chance for change nine years after incumbent Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha first came to power in a 2014 coup.
With 99% of the votes counted
by early Monday morning, the junior opposition Move Forward Party had eked out
a small edge over the favored Pheu Thai Party, whose leaders earlier in the
night conceded they might not finish on top.
The winner of Sunday’s vote is
not assured the right to form the new government. A joint session of the
500-seat House of Representatives will be held with the 250-member Senate in
July to select the new prime minister, a process widely seen as undemocratic
because the Senators were appointed by the military rather than elected but
vote along with Sunday’s winning lawmakers.
Sunday’s voter turnout was
about 39.5 million, or 75% of registered voters.
The maverick Move Forward
Party captured just over 24% of the popular vote for the House of
Representatives’ 400 constituency seats and an almost 36% share of the vote for
seats allocated in a separate nationwide ballot for the 100 members elected by
proportional representation.
Pheu Thai Party lagged
slightly behind with just over 23% for the constituency seats and about a 27%
share for the party list.
The tally of constituency
votes gave Move Forward 113 House seats and Pheu Thai 112, according to the
Election Commission, which did not give a projection for party list seats.
Prayuth’s United Thai Nation
Party held the fifth spot in the constituency vote with almost 9% of the total,
but it placed third in the party-preference tally with close to 12%. Its
constituency vote gave it 23 House seats.
The three parties were
considered before the vote to the most likely to head a new government.
Paetongtarn Shinawatra, 36-year-old daughter of the former billionaire populist
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, had been favored in opinion polls to be
chosen the country’s next leader.
Move Forward’s leader,
42-year=old businessman Pita Limjaroenrat, now seems as likely a prospect.
Prayuth had been blamed for a
stuttering economy, shortcomings in addressing the pandemic and thwarting
democratic reforms, a particular sore point with younger voters.
The returns were a good sign
for democratization, said Saowanee T. Alexander, a professor at Ubon
Ratchathani University in northeastern Thailand.
“This is people saying that we
want change ... They are saying that they could no longer take it. The people
are very frustrated. They want change, and they could achieve it,” she said.
Move Forward outperformed even
optimistic projections, and the party appeared poised to capture all, or almost
all, 33 House seats in the capital Bangkok.
Along with Pheu Thai, it
campaigned for reform of the military and the monarchy. But Move Forward put
those issues closer to the heart of its platform, earning a more radical
reputation.
Its outspoken support for
minor reforms of the monarchy, while winning younger voters, antagonized
conservatives to whom the royal institution is sacrosanct.
Pheu Thai is the latest in a
string of parties linked to former Prime Minister Thaksin, who was ousted as
prime minister by an army coup in 2006. Pheu Thai candidate Paetongtarn is his
daughter. The government of her aunt, Yingluck Shinawatra, who became prime
minister in 2011, was toppled in the coup led by Prayuth.
Pheu Thai won the most seats
in the last election in 2019, but its archrival, the military-backed Palang
Pracharath Party, succeeded in cobbling together a coalition with Prayuth as
prime minister. It relied on unanimous support from the Senate, whose members
were appointed by the military government after Prayuth’s coup and share its
conservative outlook.
Ubon University’s Alexander
cautioned that the current situation remains “very unpredictable,” and that the
Election Commission could unilaterally affect the results. In the past, it has
used its authority to disqualify opposition parties or otherwise cripple
challenges to the conservative establishment.
Move Forward’s Pita would be a
possible target for what the opposition, from bitter experience, calls dirty
tricks. A candidate from the military-backed Palang Pracharath Party last week
filed a complaint with the Election Commission and the National Anti-Corruption
Commission, charging that Pita had failed to list a stock shareholding on a
statutory declaration of his assets. Pita denied any wrongdoing, and the
accusation hinges on a minor technical point.
However, the leader of the
Future Forward Party, the forerunner of Move Forward, lost his seat in
Parliament on similar technical grounds, and his party ended up being
dissolved. It had also been seen as a radical challenge to the military-backed
royalist establishment.
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