I’d Be Thailand’s Leader Now if the System Wasn’t Rigged

Opinion|I’d Be Thailand’s Leader Now if the System Wasn’t Rigged

Two years ago, I walked into the Thai Parliament, ready to be chosen as the new prime minister. My party, Move Forward, had been handed a victory by millions of Thais who voted resoundingly to break the grip of a corrupt, anti-democratic political old guard.

Yet in Thai politics, nothing is ever certain.

The country’s power brokers soon conspired to block Move Forward from forming a government. Trumped-up lawsuits followed, and last year the Constitutional Court disbanded the party and barred me from politics for 10 years.

Since then, Thailand has cycled through prime ministers with dizzying speed, driven by this same game of political roulette. Last week, Parliament chose yet another — Anutin Charnvirakul — a conservative whose party only managed to place a distant third in the 2023 elections.

Democracy is under threat globally. And as Thailand shows, autocratic forces today secure their grip not only with tanks and rifle butts. Increasingly, they wield the velvet cudgel of lawfare: the undemocratic use of legal mechanisms and nominally independent bodies to dissolve parties, disqualify candidates and cripple opposition.

In Thailand, nonelected institutions remain stronger than the will of the people. This is slowly strangling my country, a U.S. treaty ally that stood as a longtime bastion of stability in an often-volatile Southeast Asia.

Since transitioning from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy in 1932, Thailand has gone through a dozen coups and nearly 20 constitutions. Each of them weakened democracy while entrenching nonelected power. The most recent coup, in 2014, imposed five years of rule by a military junta. New elections were held in 2019, but a constitution drafted in the wake of the coup has ensured the military’s continued political influence. That charter gave sweeping authority to courts and watchdog agencies whose judges and commissioners were appointed directly or indirectly by the junta.