Thailand’s Government Promised Change. It’s Delivering Chaos

In late April, less than a year after his government took office, Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin announced a Cabinet reshuffle. The news was accompanied by the abrupt resignation of Foreign Minister Parnpree Bahiddha-Nukara and followed by the resignations of Vice Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow and Deputy Finance Minister Krisada Chinavicharana last week.

The upheaval within the ruling coalition underscores the degree to which, since Thailand’s general election in May 2023, the country’s politics, which could have been calmed by a successful vote, have only become more polarized and chaotic.

In the immediate aftermath of what was the country’s first relatively free election since the end of military rule in 2018, Move Forward, the reformist party that won the most Lower House parliamentary seats in the polls, was never given a real chance to form a government. Before leaving power, the junta had crafted a new constitution by which a party had to win not just a majority in the Lower House to take power, but rather a majority of the combined Lower House and Senate. Given that nearly all the fairly conservative senators owed their place in the Upper House to the former junta, Move Forward, which had vast support among Thailand’s youth, had no chance.

Infuriated by being kept out of power, Move Forward sparked open resistance to the cobbled-together ruling coalition government, which is led by Srettha’s Pheu Thai party but includes some openly military-aligned parties as well. Anger swelled even more among large sections of the Thai populace when the judiciary, which is aligned with the military, the monarchy, and other conservative elites, moved to defang Move Forward, similar to how it has attacked other pro-democracy parties over the past twenty-five years. The leader of Move Forward has already been found guilty of several criminal charges, which could lead to him being banned from Thai politics for a decade, and the party itself may be formally disbanded.

Despite boiling anger among some Thais over the 2023 election outcome, if Srettha’s government had actually taken major steps to address Thailand’s burning issues, it might have avoided intense popular blowback. These problems include high youth unemployment, a growing number of Thai farmers unable to survive on their production, poor air quality, and an overall weak economy compared to that of neighbors like Vietnam and Indonesia, among others. If the government could competently address at least some of these issues, it is likely that even some voters who supported Move Forward would have come around to approving of Srettha’s administration.

But his government has done little to address those issues, and now, with the Cabinet reshuffle and high-profile resignations, it seems to be in chaos. Parnpree’s decision to step down as foreign minister was all the more shocking, as Sebastian Strangio of the Diplomat noted, since he had just been appointed to head a new task force managing Thailand’s approach to the crisis in neighboring Myanmar. He had also played a major role in freeing several Thai migrant workers who were taken hostage by Hamas during the attack on southern Israel on October 7.

It remains unclear why Parnpree resigned, although he has said it was because he lost his dual post as deputy prime minister in the Cabinet reshuffle. But it is notable that he was replaced by Maris Sangiampongsa, a career diplomat with close ties to former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

Thaksin recently returned to Thailand from Dubai, where he spent seventeen years in self-imposed exile after having been forced out of office in a previous military coup in 2006. Even from afar, however, he remained the dominant civilian force in Thai politics through his family dynasty. His sister Yingluck became prime minister in 2011, only to be ousted by the Constitutional Court in a ruling heavily influenced by the military, weeks before the military junta took power in 2014. And his daughter Paetongtarn led Pheu Thai’s campaign in last year’s election.

Though Thaksin purportedly has no role in Pheu Thai, in reality he remains the key force behind both the party and the government. His role as a shadow actor who ultimately determines Pheu Thai policies, with little transparency, is yet another major irritant for many Thais when it comes to the current government.

If Parnpree was too much his own man to cede his influence to Thaksin, Maris seems to have no objections to doing so. With regard to Myanmar, for instance, Thaksin appears to be overriding official Thai policy to conduct his own personal diplomatic initiative. In recent weeks, he has held a series of meeting with groups opposed to Myanmar’s military junta, an approach inconsistent with the government’s official claim of not picking sides in the country’s civil war. Thaksin even reportedly kept Srettha in the dark about what he was doing, a source of embarrassment for the prime minister.

The recent Cabinet reshuffle, in which Srettha shed his dual position as finance minister, is unlikely to reassure anyone that the government is working well together.

But degrading the quality of the Cabinet through loyalist politics is just the latest mess the current government has made since taking office last summer. It has also failed to live up to its promises to address Thailand’s many ills.

To bolster consumer spending and alleviate poverty, the government had promised to give all Thais 10,000 baht—around $270 at current exchange rates—via a digital wallet. As planned, the measure already seemed like a recipe for disaster, in part because it remains unclear how the government will fund it, but also because many of the people it needs to reach do not have digital wallets due to lack of internet access and/or smartphones. So it’s perhaps for the better that the government has yet to move on it.

Worse is the government’s failure to follow through on its promise of major debt relief for many small and medium-sized Thai companies as well as Thai farmers, who have been hit hard by climate change and fluctuating prices for their crops. The government had also suggested it would decentralize Thai politics to give more power to local authorities and communities, given Thailand’s highly centralized, Bangkok-dominated politics. This decentralization plan, too, seems to have gone nowhere.

At the same time, doing and saying nothing as the courts try to ban the leading opposition party and sentence its leader on dubious charges does nothing to restore Thailand’s weak rule of law. It also badly undermines Pheu Thai’s image among many Thais. For years, the party and its previously banned predecessors were vocal supporters of democracy, even if Pheu Thai governments were guilty of some democratic backsliding while in power. The fact that two Pheu Thai governments were deposed by a military coup and a de facto coup further burnished its pro-democracy credentials. Now many Thais see it as having thrown in its lot with the hated military and other elites. Perhaps unsurprisingly, despite promising on the campaign trail to reform Thailand’s ineffective and massively top-heavy army, Pheu Thai has waffled on any rapid or major initiatives to do so.

More broadly, the government has developed no clear and feasible programs to bolster Thailand’s lagging economic growth. The country’s GDP grew by less than 2 percent last year, while the GDPs of Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines all expanded by more than twice that. Nor has it addressed youth employment, which is prevalent not only among young Thais without significant education but also among the graduates of the country’s best universities.

Distrusted by many Thais from the outset, Pheu Thai and its coalition partners now seem uninterested in any real reforms, whether on social and political issues or the rule of law. Increasingly dominated by Thaksin and struggling with Cabinet dysfunction, the government has failed to tackle the complaints of a large majority of Thais. Given its current trajectory, a round of major street protests for which the country is well-known seems almost inevitable as Thais’ anger grows.