Pita Limjaroenrat was on a Thai Airways flight from New York on September 19, 2006, bound for Bangkok to attend his father’s funeral. En route, the aircraft stopped in London.
That day, on that very plane, Thailand’s then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was wrestling with what would abruptly end his term: A Thai army chief had staged a coup in Bangkok, usurping the billionaire politician who had been attending the U.N. General Assembly in Manhattan.
Any tension eluded Pita as Thaksin — determined to fend off the junta from afar — had arranged to disembark at London’s Gatwick Airport.
“They must have been busy, but I wouldn’t have known. My father had just passed away,” Pita said of what happened onboard between Thaksin and government officials, some of whom had been Pita’s bosses before he entered a graduate program in public policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School just weeks before.
Grief over the loss of his banker-turned-entrepreneur father may still shroud Pita’s recollections of 2006. But the repeat of military intervention in Thai politics in 2014 gave rise to his political fortune as he leads the youth-backed Gao Glai or Move Forward Party in the nationwide May 14 election.
In this contest, Pita offers ideas for change matching the party’s slogan: “Vote for Move Forward, and Thailand will never be the same.” He envisions a victory ending the cycle of military coups that has disrupted Thai politics roughly every seven years since the kingdom established itself as a democratic constitutional monarchy in 1932.
“First is you have to demilitarize and make sure that the power and the finances of the army are in check, in balance,” said Pita, 42, in a recent interview with VOA Thai. He is also proposing a seven-year break before a military officer can enter politics after leaving service. Pita added that a new constitution should be drafted by the people with clauses preventing public servants from supporting a coup and allowing no impunity for coup leaders.
The Move Forward platform highlights universal welfare benefits from child care allowances to financial support for elders, worth nearly $20 billion. Some 7.7% of that sum would come from downsizing the military.
SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA's Vijitra Duangdee
In a poll by the newspapers Matichon and Daily News, conducted from April 22-28, Pita dominated the results on the question about choices for prime minister, with 49.17% support, followed by Paetongtarn Shinawatra at 19.59% and property magnate turned politician Srettha Thavisin at 15.54%. Both are from Pheu Thai, the party that is expected to emerge with the largest bloc of seats in parliament. The results are based on responses from 78,583 online participants.
Pheu Thai had an edge over Pita in earlier surveys, including one by a research arm of the National Institute of Development Administration, NIDA Poll, during April 3-7.
Pita’s closest competitor in the newspapers’ poll comes from a politically prominent family. Paetongtarn, 36, is Thaksin’s daughter, and the two candidates have known each other since middle school as Pita’s uncle was close to Thaksin’s family.
Rebuilding the party
In 2014, another army chief, General Prayut Chan-ocha, ousted then-Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, Thaksin’s younger sister, paving the way for Prayut’s more than eight years of premiership. In the middle of the general’s rule, Thailand held an election on March 24, 2019.
Pita’s party, then called Future Forward, was led by a scion of the Thai auto-parts empire, Summit Group. Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit’s progressive ideology and youthful charisma attracted new, mostly young people to politics.
Just over a year after its founding, Future Forward won 81 seats in the 2019 election to become Thailand’s third biggest party. Pita, with experience as a management consultant before obtaining his graduate degrees from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, entered the lower house of parliament.
Future Forward captured the imagination of voters and dared to push back against the establishment’s power that had long centered on the revered institution of the monarchy.
But Prayut, with the backing of the 250-member senate controlled by his allies, formed a coalition government in 2019. Then, in February 2020, the Constitutional Court handed down a decision to disband Future Forward, finding the party had illegally accepted a $6 million loan from Thanathorn.
The ruling also barred key members of the party, including Thanathorn, from holding political offices. Pita, who had earned accolades from both sides of the aisle for his oratory skills, emerged from the chaos as the new leader of Future Forward’s new incarnation, the Move Forward Party.
Pita told VOA Thai that he wants Move Forward to win more seats in the upcoming elections than Future Forward did in 2019.
“I (am trying) to institutionalize the party to make sure that it's a political institution with structure, strategy, processes,” Pita said. “Once we've done that, we could replicate the model and we could do better next time and next time.”
Avoiding ‘personalized politics’
In Thailand where many leaders from kings to commoners have been informally called “father” and revered, that patriarchal practice often holds sway in elections as politicians emerge as a brand.
Political figures in large and small districts of Thailand’s 77 provinces measure mass popularity by the number of flowers and long, colorful checkered scarves supporters place on them, reminiscent of the way worshipers pay homage to a sacred shrine.
Thaksin, who now lives in self-imposed exile in Dubai following a controversial corruption conviction, personifies this culture as he endorses candidates from afar. The populist firebrand stirs an almost visceral revulsion in his detractors. His supporters mock that as “fearing the ghost of Thaksin.” Few other elected Thai officials in recent history have inspired such a cult of personality.
“I don’t believe so much in personalized politics. I believe in institutionalized politics because it has to be … teamwork. There has to be a system in place,” Pita said. “Personalized politics, I don’t think, (will) work with the current challenges here in Thailand. To have some sort of personality that can approach the people with humility, with sincerity, might be something that is good so that people can relate to you and listen to what you have to propose. But institutionalized politics is the way to go.”
During a recent rally in Thailand’s northeastern province of Nong Khai across the Mekong River from Laos, the crowd showered Pita, who is divorced and has custody of his daughter, with adulation. The onetime Boston Consulting Group consultant campaigned in breathtaking heat with piles of traditional heavy garlands of golden orange marigolds coiled around his neck.
The constituents treated the man who wants to institutionalize politics as the modern technocrat version of the paternalistically branded politician he hopes to edge from the system.
“Gao Glai understands the new generation, but also cares about the elders,” Pita told his supporters before leaving in a van with tinted windows. A tube of sunscreen and a copy of Bernie Sanders’ book, “It’s OK To Be Angry About Capitalism,” were in a bag next to him.
Youth-backed party
Young voters who propelled Thanathorn into a political force are now coalescing behind Move Forward. The party distinguishes itself from some 70 competitors in the May 14 race as the most vocal advocate for ending mandatory military conscription, decentralizing power to provincial Thailand, dismantling the monopoly in the alcohol industry and amending the country’s strict royal defamation laws.
Social media and data analytics are connecting the Move Forward Party with Thai youth, a tactic adopted from Barack Obama’s winning 2008 election strategy for the U.S. presidency. Pita understands the importance of building an online base, having accompanied his American classmates who volunteered in the Obama campaign while at the Kennedy School.
SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA's Vijitra Duangdee
The online strategy has attracted voter participation. A few weeks ago, a TikTok user with the account named misterknp2 produced a viral clip showing how to add Pita’s photos to an album on the dating app Tinder in an effort to canvass for voters on behalf of Move Forward.
But the old ways have their place, specifically Pita’s back, right arm and right foot, where he has tattoos, including a Maori design, which he says invokes “good luck, when you want some victory in a competition.”
