Thailand’s newest pro-democracy party says it is determined to continue the fight for human rights and democracy despite facing a number of legal and political obstacles.
The People’s Party was formed in August after the dissolution of the reformist Move Forward Party and is already looking ahead to the 2027 general elections.
But some observers and analysts are concerned whether the opposition party will survive and whether its controversial promises will ever be fulfilled.
“In the next the three years it’s a matter of how we can beat the battle for the majority seats in parliament. I have to accept it’s not an easy task to do, but I truly believe it’s possible to achieve,” Natthaphong Reungpanyawut, leader of the People’s Party, told the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand on Sept. 26.
“Our main priorities and policies will be still the same … to protect human rights and to bring full democracy to Thailand. We want to bring power back to the people, and no one can stop that. For the next election, I believe we have to get at least 20 million votes to get the majority seats in parliament,” he added.
The party’s predecessors – the Future Forward Party and the Move Forward Party – received 8 million and 14 million votes, respectively, in the past two national elections.
Thitinan Pondsudhirak, a renowned political scientist in Thailand, says the new party’s ambitious goal isn’t that far-fetched, given the trajectory of recent elections.
“They have good prospects at the polls,” he told VOA. "They’re being deliberately ambitious, but at the same time, it's not unrealistic, given the jump [from] the popular votes from Future Forward to Move Forward.
“The brick wall that they're against is not the polling booth. The brick wall is against the royalist establishment,” he said.
The People's Party has maintained it will continue with one of the Move Forward Party's main pledges, which is amending Thailand’s “lese majeste” law, which prohibits criticism of the Thai royals.
This is despite Thailand’s Constitutional Court dissolving the Move Forward Party on August 7 after ruling the group’s pledges threatened to overthrow the monarchy. The party’s leaders were also banned from politics for 10 years.
Prior to that, Move Forward had won the most votes in the 2023 general election, before the Thai Senate blocked the party from forming a government, also because of its campaign pledges.
The Future Forward Party was also dissolved in 2020 by Thailand's Constitutional Court, which ruled the party accepted a donation from its leader, violating election law. The party said it had received the money as a loan, not a donation.
Natthaphong says one of his party's policy aims is to limit the powers of the judiciary.
“The article-by-article constitution amendment, to limit the power of the Constitutional Court, to not overrule the government that is elected by the people, that is a very practical thing we can do as an opposition party over the next three years," he said.
But two months into its existence, the future of the People’s Party is already in doubt after Thailand’s National Anti-Corruption Commission said it was investigating 44 lawmakers who formerly belonged to the Move Forward Party. Twenty-five of those lawmakers are current MPs for the People’s Party.
The probe alleges the lawmakers broke ethics rules for supporting a bill that was to amend the lese majeste law.
Sirikanya Tansakun, deputy leader of the People’s Party, is one of the lawmakers being investigated. She told the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand on Sept. 26 that the case doesn’t make sense.
“We are the members of the House of Representatives, and our duty is to pass the laws,” she said. “As we endorsed the law to amendment of Article 112 of the Criminal Code, I don’t think it’s considered a violation of ethics at all, but in this country, anything is possible and totally unpredictable and they don’t think in rational, logical sense.”
Some analysts believe the People’s Party is fighting an almost impossible cause for continuing to achieve these controversial policies.
“The future of the People’s Party is, I think, very murky,” Tita Sanglee, an independent analyst, told VOA. “There are definitely many voters willing to give it a chance, including many conservatives, who’ve become disillusioned by the whole Thaksin-joining-forces-with conservative-parties saga and are desperate for a ‘fresh’ option.”
On the other hand, she added, the party will almost definitely face legal challenges. And even if they stop trying to amend the constitution, many of their proposals remain sensitive.
“Even if The People’s Party wins by a landslide and takes office in the next election, I doubt it can achieve half of what it promises,” Sanglee said.
The party wants to implement more than 300 policy goals, including ending military conscription, promoting labor protections and making it legal to criticize the royal family.
The party labels this as the three “D’s” – demonopolization, demilitarization and decentralization – which began under Move Forward’s leadership.
Pravit Rojanaphruk, a veteran journalist for Khaosod English in Thailand, says both voters and conservatives may not see the People’s Party as anything different to their predecessors, and that may work against the group.
“[The Move Forward Party] have failed to form a government despite having won most seats in 2023 and some voters may doubt if they are really capable of forming a government after the next general election, since all major parties have basically vowed to not join a coalition with them due to their stance on the lese majeste law and the monarchy,” he said.
“The not so obvious obstacle is how they can shake off the image of being branded as the new main threat to national security by conservative people and how to keep their members motivated if they fail to form the government again in 2027,” he added.
But Sirikanya remained confident that change will happen.
“Every time that the system tries to beat us, they have used up their own political capital from those funny rulings or verdicts,” he said. “If we keep fighting this fight, and people back us more and more, someday, maybe in my next generation or the next one, if we keep fighting, we will win.”
