Pita Limjaroenrat has regained her smile, six months after the highest levels of Thailand vetoed her access to power. This Wednesday, the Constitutional Court declared his disqualification as a deputy null and void, opening the door for him to regain his seat and, possibly, the leadership of Avanzar, the reformist party that received the most votes in the last elections.
Against him, the Electoral Commission had argued that Pita had turned out to be a shareholder in a television channel, something incompatible with the exercise of politics, according to strict Thai legislation. The defense of the Avanzar leader has been able to convince eight of the nine magistrates that it was a package of a few thousand inherited shares – recently transferred to other family members – and that iTV had stopped broadcasting more than fifteen years ago.
The liberal Pita Limjaroenrat was left with honey on his lips last year, after Avanzar won the general elections in votes and seats, narrowly beating Pheu Thai, Thaksin Shinawatra’s populist party. In July, however, he had already been stripped of his seat and the 250 senators hand-picked by the army fulfilled what was entrusted to them when it came to electing prime minister. Clearly, the generals who dominated the country since the 2014 coup d’état did not accept ceding the first political line to neophytes with a reformist program.
The monarchical military leadership preferred to agree on the return of the fugitive Thaksin and cede power to a coalition unimaginable a few years ago. Nothing less than between the forces related to the army – with several officers occupying seats – and their former persecuted Pheu Thai. Even ceding the head of government to Srettha Thavisin, a veteran businessman of the latter party. More digestible, in any case, than his leader, Thaksin’s daughter (previously the billionaire’s sister had been).
The military could not look favorably on Avanzar’s promise to soften the lèse majeste law, which currently punishes each alleged offense to the crown with harsh prison sentences. Although Pita himself comes from the most privileged class of Thai society, his party has grown electorally thanks to his reformist promises and his skill in social networks, especially among young people and the middle classes.
The promise of the liberal Pita, a Harvard alumnus, to “dismantle monopolies” could be as much a threat to the establishment, as his voters want to believe, as a new privatization program. He himself was the CEO in Thailand of the Singapore-based multinational Grab, which occupies a dominant position in taxi and home delivery services in several Southeast Asian countries.
More than its barely revolutionary economic proposals, what still keeps part of Thailand’s military, bureaucratic and economic elite awake at night (the latter, made up mostly of Thais of Chinese origin) are the symptoms that Avanzar could give a lurch in international politics, breaking with a long period of equidistance between the United States and China. Confirming these fears, Pita attended the celebration of “Taiwan National Day” on October 10 at the Taipei representation in Bangkok.
Likewise, its position regarding the invasion of Ukraine is aligned with Washington, something that in Asia only Japan, South Korea and Singapore share. On a recent American tour, Pita even declared that “Thailand needs to get back on America’s radar.” His immediate plans, as he has declared, are these: “Tomorrow, receive a foreign visitor and, on the weekend, tour the north of the country.”
Srettha Thavisin, on the other hand, not only attended the Silk Roads summit in Beijing, organized last October by Xi Jinping, but also took the opportunity to extend an invitation to Vladimir Putin to visit Thailand. A month later, the current prime minister participated in the peaceful summit in San Francisco with the same smile alongside Joe Biden.
It is no surprise that rising China is Thailand’s first trading partner. Furthermore, for a decade now, Chinese tourists have been the most important for the Thai economy – now sluggish – ahead of Westerners. However, their influx has not completely recovered since the pandemic, to the despair of the sector, not even after exempting them from visas, like the Russians. The towels of the latter coexist without problems with those of Ukrainians, Chinese, Indians, Australians, Israelis and Europeans on the beaches of Phuket or Samui.
On the other hand, in the ears of the establishment, Pita Limjaroenrat combines his impeccable suits and his airs as a perfect son-in-law with the arguments of a Western NGO. Something he would never have been able to do during the Cold War, when Thailand was the US’s most important partner in the region, along with the Philippines, especially during the Vietnam War. It should be said that, despite his almost youthful appearance, Pita is a 43-year-old divorcee and has a daughter.
Although the liberal politician gave up the leadership of the party in September, unable to access Parliament, he does not rule out recovering it, when possible. There remains, in fact, a dark cloud on the horizon, since the same court will have to examine next week whether his party’s promises to relax the lese majeste law constitute a crime.
Anything is possible in Thailand, which has already dismantled the predecessor party of Avanzar in the past, as it had previously outlawed several reincarnations of Thaksin’s populist party, with greater popularity among the working classes and in the impoverished areas of the north and northeast. Fifteen years ago, moreover, Bangkok disqualified a “red shirt” prime minister, supporters of Thaksin. In this case, not by having shares in a network, but by working as a paid television chef. Imagination to the third power.
Although Thais do not vote in 2024, their political calendar is packed. The five-year term of the current senate elected manu militari (250 preselected seats, compared to 500 freely elected in the House of Representatives) expires. There will be compromises over the next senators, no matter how much Pheu Thai promised to eliminate vestiges of the past stage.
It remains to be seen how it may affect the legislature, although recent experience suggests that there will be no significant change that is not agreed upon. And part of that package will be the role that both the promising Pita Limjaroenrat and the incombustible Thaksin Shinawatra can play. The billionaire former prime minister, who agreed to a year in prison with the generals, is about to serve six months of his sentence – in theory, in a select hospital, for medical reasons – which must guarantee him permission.
