Category: Thailand Election 2023
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The Baan Yai: Is All Politics Local?
The Chart Thai Pattana Party has an illustrious history. It claims descent from the now-deceased Chart Thai Party, which propelled two leaders to the prime ministership: Chatichai Choonhavan, in 1988, and Banharn Silpa-archa, in 1995. In its last years it is the latter figure that the party came to be identified with. Banharn, whose grip…
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The Reinvention of General Prawit
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a PR consultant for General Prawit Wongsuwan: the deputy prime minister of Thailand and leader of the Palang Pracharath Party. You are tasked with repackaging the deputy prime minister into an appealing product for the upcoming general election. Your first instinct is probably: that sounds like an immensely difficult…
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A Shadow Looms Large over the Pheu Thai Party
“It is a kindness,” the Roman poet Ovid once wrote, “that the mind can go where it wishes.” Exiled from Italy to a port city on the black sea, the deeply homesick poet wrote a series of letters lamenting his fate to his friends. Thaksin Shinawatra, in his self-imposed exile of many years, does not…
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The United Thai Nation Party’s Radical Conservatism
“What is an ideology?” This was a question that Dr. Trairong Suwankiri, a former deputy prime minister, rhetorically posed to the audience at the United Thai Nation Party event earlier this month where Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha was unveiled as the party’s standard-bearer. “An ideology,” he explained, “is the general direction a political party wants…
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Prayut’s Cabinet of Rivals Imperils Prospects of a Third Term
The past week, the outspoken conservative academic Seri Wongmontha, wrote a Facebook post on how he had once predicted that several MPs will resign from parliament in order to join a new party near the end of the term. He had been proven right, he noted, given that 31 MPs have just quit their posts.…
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NIDA Polls Paint a Complicated Picture for Prayut’s Future
After the 2014 coup, the then leader of the coup, General Prayut Chan-o-cha, came to power insisting that he had never wanted the post of premier for himself. “I didn’t want to be prime minister. It’s not cool. It’s tiring,” he said in a press conference shortly after the start of his tenure. That was…
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Thailand’s Political Parties in Flux
General Wit Thephasadin Na Ayudhya has been through his fair share of Thai political party drama lately. At the start of this year, he was the chief strategist for the Palang Pracharath Party (PPRP). He then did a short stint as the head of the Thai Economics Party, the PPRP breakaway party formed by Captain…
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Can Anutin Charnvirakul Become Thailand’s Next Prime Minister?
“A man’s worth,” the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius once said, “is no greater than his ambitions.” If this is true both for people and parties, then the Bhumjai Thai party’s value is high indeed. Deputy Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, Bhumjai Thai’s leader, recently made clear his grand ambitions for the party at a rally in…
Ken Mathis Lohatepanont 