Thailand’s most popular political party is facing a spate of legal challenges that could see it dissolved or its lawmakers ejected from parliament since a top court found it in breach of the constitution.
The Constitutional Court ruled last week that Move Forward harbored a hidden agenda to undermine the country’s constitutional monarchy by campaigning for reform of a defamation law that punishes any insult to Thailand’s powerful royal family with up to 15 years in jail.
The court ordered the party to stop its efforts to amend the law but handed down no punishment for the constitutional breach.
Since the verdict, though, Move Forward’s critics have filed several petitions with the government that could ultimately have the party dissolved or see all its lawmakers dismissed.
Move Forward won the most votes and lower house seats in last year’s national elections with plans to rein in the country’s royalist, pro-military elites but found itself shut out of the governing coalition and shunted into opposition by a military-appointed Senate.
Reacting to the latest legal challenges, Move Forward lawmaker and spokesman Parit Wacharasindhu insisted the party had done nothing wrong and said it would fight the claims vigorously.
“But as we have seen with the Constitutional Court ruling, not everything is under our control and our worldview may not be the same as that of the establishment and related organizations,” he told VOA.
As of Wednesday, a total of five petitions have been filed with the Election Commission or the National Anti-Corruption Commission claiming that Move Forward and its lawmakers, by trying to undermine Thailand’s system of government, had broken a host of other laws. If either commission deems any of the claims sound, it can forward the case to the courts.
If the courts find Move Forward or its members guilty, they can then either dissolve the party or ban its lawmakers from public office for life, depending on which law the courts say they broke.
The claims have some precedent. The Move Forward Party’s spiritual predecessor, Future Forward, was dissolved by the courts over an illegal loan in 2020, after it finished a strong third in national elections the year before. It was the third party posing a serious challenge to the conservative establishment dissolved by court order in the past 12 years.
Taking nothing for granted, Move Forward says it has already started making plans in case it too is dissolved or if its lawmakers are banned.
Pita told VOA it was too soon to elaborate on those plans, as the petitions would take time to work their way through the commissions and possibly courts.
“However, what is true and will always hold true is that regardless of what happens to our party or our MPs, the underlying ideas and ideologies will still carry on through some vehicle or another, both inside and outside parliament,” he said.
Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang, a legal scholar at Thailand’s Chulalongkorn University, says the party faces a genuine existential threat.
He questioned the logic of last week’s verdict. But given the ruling, he said the petitions seeking to dissolve the party, rather than merely ban its lawmakers, seemed the most likely to succeed.
“Because the text of the law is clear; it leaves no room. If you are identified as trying to overthrow the regime, the following consequence definitely is to dissolve the party,” he told VOA.
“It doesn’t mean that the [Constitutional Court’s] decision makes sense, but it means that the decision may trigger the process that would be almost automatic,” he said.
Since last week’s verdict, Move Forward has removed any mention of its plans to amend the royal insult law from its official website.
But Khemthong says that’s not likely to satisfy the party’s opponents, viewing Move Forward’s very existence as a threat to Thailand’s reactionary establishment.
“It’s not about any particular policies right now. It’s the existence of the party that they find problematic,” he said, adding that the courts could potentially hand down a ruling on one of the petitions in a matter of weeks.
Titipol Phakdeewanich, however, dean of the political science faculty at Thailand's Ubon Ratchathani University, says the commissions and courts are more likely to take their time with the petitions.
Wary of the mass protests that followed the court case against Future Forward four years ago, he said they may try to drag out the cases and use them as leverage to temper Move Forward’s other ambitions. Besides amending the royal insult law, the party’s other popular plans include reforms to the military and big business, two other pillars of the country’s political elite.
Titipol said going through with the threat and actually dissolving Move Forward or ejecting its slate of lawmakers could even backfire on the party’s opponents by galvanizing its supporters, even if it must form a new party to carry on its cause.
“I think that might be one of the [courts’] main considerations, because if they do this it could ... help Move Forward to achieve their goal to win a big landslide in the next election cycle,” he said.
Khemthong agreed that the end of Move Forward as a party would not put an end to the swelling demands for structural political reforms that it has tapped into and could do just the opposite.
Since the pro-democracy protests sparked by the lawsuit that ultimately brought down Future Forward, the courts have charged over 260 people with defaming the king and sentenced some of them to several years in jail. Yet calls to reform and soften, even do away with the law have continued.
“So, all these lawsuits, all these petitions, they [won’t] stamp out the idea. As long as the elites continue to exercise their power like that, they just infuriate the public,” Khemthong said. “In a way, it’s not Future Forward who fueled the public to call for reform; it’s the elites themselves that paint themselves into the corner.”
