Half a decade ago, the Thai military seized power with a promise to bring reconciliation to a bitterly divided country.

But the elections on March 24 that the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) junta finally permitted after repeated delays have made evident its failure in that area.

The performance of four parties in Sunday’s elections makes the depth of the country’s persistent division and polarisation clear.

The Pheu Thai Party largely maintained its hold over much of Northern and North-eastern Thailand, along with less affluent areas of Bangkok.

It carried nine of the capital’s 30 seats, and its total of 135 seats overall put in it on course to be the largest single party in the new parliament.

This fairly straightforward, and generally expected, result illustrates the strength of continued “Red Shirt” loyalty to former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his legacy.

Other results proved less straightforward. The pro-junta Phalang Pracharat Party’s success in winning a greater share of the popular vote than any other party surprised observers in Thailand.

Putting aside for a moment allegations that the NCPO government somehow “rigged” the elections in this party’s favour, several factors explain its success.

One is its ability to rely on the support of the state and on the electoral networks of the traditional provincial politicians whom it recruited to its fold. Access to these resources surely helped it win 98 constituency seats and 18 party-list seats.  

The latter comprise 150 of the 500 seats in the lower house of the Thai parliament. The number of party-list seats that a party wins is based on its share of the total vote in the 350 constituency races.

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A second, largely overlooked, factor in Phalang Pracharat’s success was also its appeal to voters sympathetic to its authoritarian, hard-line anti-Red Shirt orientation.

This effect is evident in the election results in Bangkok, where vote-rigging would be particularly difficult. It secured 13 seats in the Thai capital, more than any other party.

Phalang Pracharat’s electoral success means that the leading “Yellow” or notionally royalist party in the country will be one created by the Thai military, and nakedly authoritarian in its political vision.

This development underlines the hardening of political divisions to which Sunday’s poll results point.

The emergence of Phalang Pracharat as Pheu Thai’s leading political antagonist comes very much at the expense of the Democrat Party, whose disastrous performance in the elections led former Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva to resign as party leader.

The Democrats won no seats in Bangkok, one of their traditional bases of voter support.

A significant number of voters in the capital apparently abandoned the Democrat Party in favour of the harder-line Phalang Pracharat.

Alongside Phalang Pracharat, the Future Forward Party was the great winner in Sunday’s elections. Its success in winning Bangkok’s remaining eight seats reflects Future Forward’s appeal to younger, better educated urban voters.

What is, however, most significant about Future Forward’s having captured a total 80 seats is not just that a new party, without military backing, will be the third-largest party in the parliament.

It is, rather, that Future Forward is the only party winning both constituency and party-list seats that won more of the latter than of the former.

Future Forward’s party-list total stands at 51 seats, in contrast to its 29 constituency seats.

What this result means is that the party’s message — not of selfies with its handsome leader in Bangkok shopping malls but rather of military reform, an end to monopolies’ dominance of the Thai economy, and attention to the crisis of socio-economic inequality — resonated with voters across the country.

Its reliance on networks of former student activists in provincial Thailand gave particular forcefulness to this message.

Constituency 1 in Trang Province, in the Democrats’ traditional second base of support in the Upper South, is a case in point. Phalang Pracharat’s candidate in that constituency, a retired officer of the Ministry of Interior, toppled a senior member of the Democrat Party by a margin of some 1,600 votes.

But the more significant result there was that the third-place candidate, a member of the Future Forward Party, won 16,000 votes toward the party’s quota of 51 party-list members of parliament.

Results like this latter one, replicated in constituencies all over Thailand, explain the large number of party-list seats that Future Forward won.  

They also demonstrate the widespread appeal to voters in provincial Thailand of the party’s stridently anti-authoritarian message.

Thailand has now embarked on what may be many weeks of manoeuvring and brinkmanship among the parties that scored well in Sunday’s elections and among the NCPO junta, the military, and the palace.

It is unclear whether the result will be a government led by the Pheu Thai Party or one led by Phalang Pracharat.

This will depend on the outcome of pressure on the 250 members of the country’s appointed senate, who will elect the next prime minister in a joint sitting with the lower house.

Should Pheu Thai prevail, it will face a more powerful parliamentary opposition, in the form of the Phalang Pracharat Party, than any pro-Thaksin government has ever faced.

And that opposition will represent unabashedly authoritarian political priorities.

Should Phalang Pracharat form the next government, it will face two large parties grounded firmly in opposition to authoritarianism.

The divisions in the new Thai parliament will be deep. Sparks will fly.

The contentiousness and polarisation may test of the patience of both Thai Army commander-in-chief General Apirat Kongsompong and of the palace.

It will also reflect the failure of the NCPO junta to bring harmony to Thailand before holding elections, even after delaying those elections for years.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Michael Montesano is coordinator of the Thailand Studies Programme at Iseas-Yusof Ishak Institute. The co-editor of After the Coup: The National Council for Peace and Order Era and the Future of Thailand (2019), he has observed Thai politics since 1983. Most recently, he visited Trang Province, South Thailand, to study early campaigning for the March 23 elections.