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In the aftermath of revolutionary youth-led protests in 2020–21, Thailand is now governed by an elected administration led by Paetongtarn Shinawatra‘s coalition government. This peculiar coalition includes royalist, military-linked, and clientelistic parties, all under the leadership of the Pheu Thai Party (PTP), a centrist and personalistic party with pro-reform democratic elements. Since the May 2023 general elections, youth-led street protests have vanished, and Thailand appears to have entered a period of hybrid regime after a decade of authoritarian rule.
Despite appearances of greater stability, Thailand’s social movement sector and party system remain under subtle yet intense repression by establishment forces. These forces perceive representative politics—whether expressed through street protests or within political institutions—as a systemic threat to their longevity and survival, and have manipulated representative systems in various ways. Pro-reform and democratic parties, including the incumbent Pheu Thai and particularly the anti-establishment People’s Party (PP)—the third incarnation of the Future Forward Party (FFP) and Move Forward Party (MFP) after they were banned—face threats of dissolution and selective politician bans by the Constitutional Court. Meanwhile, many youth movement leaders have been charged under draconian laws, particularly the lèse-majesté law, facing long-term imprisonment, forced to halt their activities, and many have gone into exile.
This article offers a fresh perspective on the challenges that Thailand faces in achieving a democratic breakthrough by foregrounding the role that state-led repression has played in limiting the organisational strength and social bases of democratic movements and parties. By properly apprehending this reality, I argue, we are better placed to understand what movements, parties, and their supporters—inside or outside Thailand—should prioritise amidst ongoing repression.
Strong spirit, weak body
Historically, Thailand has been locked in a continual struggle between reformist or revolutionary political parties and social movements on one side, and the hegemonic establishment—particularly the monarchy and the military—on the other. Since the 1932 revolution, royalist forces, skeptical of Siam’s readiness for representative democracy and perceiving threats to royal authority, have taken measures to suppress democratic associations. A 1933 royal decree dissolved both the People’s Party Association and the Nationalist Party Association, and amended laws to ban any social and political group deemed a threat to national security.
The action eradicated the nascent roots of democratic associational life in the aftermath of the 1932 revolution, instituting a no-party system that persisted until 1946. Acts of autocratic repression became routine, with establishment elites repeatedly stifling the development of movements and parties. Under Sarit Thanarat’s royalist regime (1958–1963), all civic space for representative organisations, including parties and movements, was eliminated. Sarit wielded Article 17 of the 1959 Interim Constitution, which granted the prime minister unchecked authority to “issue any order or perform any act whatsoever”.
State and royalist repression have for decades hence done much to shape the infrastructural development of movements and parties, resulting in weak social bases and organisational structures that persist until this day. While all parties were affected, pro-democracy parties were hit especially hard. Following the October 1976 massacre, when progressive movements were annihilated and left-wing parties dissolved, Thailand’s parties became largely clientelistic. They found little reason to invest in deep societal roots or partnerships with weakened social movements, which faced severe state repression and cooptation. Royalist regimes suppressed contentious social movements—especially labour, peasant, and student movements—while co-opting state-based civil society organisations (e.g., rural development, economic, social and cultural rights, and other grassroots organisations) into the state apparatus, maintaining vertical relationships rather than genuine autonomy.
Movement organisations focusing on democratisation or civil and political rights have rarely had access to state funding—which often imposes restrictions rather than providing support—and must rely on external funders and philanthropy, which typically prohibits partisan activities or building relationships with parties. This arrangement makes them accountable to funders rather than local constituents, further hindering their ability to build strong organisational bases.
The practice of banning counter-establishment parties outright has intensified since the coup of 2006, when establishment forces perceived significant threats from the success of Thaksin Shinawatra’s Thai Rak Thai (TRT)—the first Thai party to serve a full term without interruption and a popular majority government—to their status quo. They used “independent institutions” established under the 1997 Constitution, including the Constitutional Court and other monitoring bodies, to orchestrate the banning of popular parties and politicians. Since then, the party has been banned twice by the Constitutional Court (making Pheu Thai its third incarnation), and four of its prime ministers have been dismissed, including Prime Minister Paetongtarn’s predecessor Srettha Thavisin. Despite its post-2023 coalition with conservatives, the party still continues to face threats of dissolution from the Constitutional Court and pro-establishment mobilisation from former anti-Thaksin Yellow Shirt leaders.
State repression has significantly deinstitutionalised the Pheu Thai’s organisational and network structures since then. TRT profoundly changed Thailand’s economic and political landscape, lifting millions from absolute poverty and embedding a mass democratic political culture that fostered political rights consciousness, leading to the rise of the Red Shirt movement and its pro-democracy identity. However, the party leadership from the TRT era (2001–2006) were banned or forced to flee during a decade of junta rule, resulting in a heavily reduced party capacity—particularly in policy innovation.
A decade of authoritarian rule under the junta that seized power in 2014 weakened PTP voters’ partisanship (i.e. their enduring attachment to or identification with a political party), as shown in the 2023 elections, when the party lost its leading position for the first time. The party’s legacy of uplifting millions has faded over time. Its ideological and constituency bases—once embodied in the Red Shirt movement—also have diminished due to the absence of continual party organising on the ground during the junta period, leading to weakened social ties among grassroots networks. Importantly, its mid-level mobilisational infrastructure—a network of rural canvassers who connected party organisations with rural bases, communicated and interpreted programmatic positions at the village level, and organised local voters and their families—was largely repressed during the decade of junta rule. Pheu Thai’s rural infrastructure has not recovered, as the party has not prioritised rebuilding it.
Meanwhile, the People’s Party (PP), a successor of the banned Move Forward and Future Forward, faces similar but even more intense repression. Its former leader, Pita Limjaroenrat, has been banned from politics for 10 years, and the party risks losing more of its 44 leaders in ongoing Constitutional Court cases related to their campaign for the repeal of the lèse-majesté law. Party leadership has been in disarray and cannot cultivate new leaders quickly enough to replace those who were or will be banned.
Each party ban forces the organisation to spend lots of time managing administrative transitions to new entities, and party networks on the ground are required to halt operations or dissolve during these limbo periods. Its organisational and network structure has become more deinstitutionalised and reduced in size over time due to repression. As a result, PP has been less able to establish a mass-based party as it envisioned and tends to be trapped under the iron law of oligarchy: as my interviews with civil society figures and party workers have suggested, decision-making increasingly rests with party elites and political stars rather than its social movement bases and grassroots memberships.
Banning parties not only diminishes the long-term capacity of the Pheu Thai and People’s Party and limits their power bases—built on established relationships with constituents requiring sustained organizing efforts—but also destabilises the party system as a whole. When parties perceive that they could be banned or deinstitutionalised, they limit their grassroots expansion and invest less in building branches and organisational structures. Instead, politicians focus on loose network building—usually clientelistic—to remain agile and adaptable to external threats, enabling quick transitions to new entities when banned. This situation most clearly affects Pheu Thai, which initially emerged by forming a grand coalition of provincial dynastic families and their parties, incorporating over 100 MPs from these parties and inheriting their clientelistic networks.
It is also important to recognise the repressive, divide-and-rule context of the post-2023 elections. The Move Forward Party, which won the most seats, could not form a government pact with the runner-up, Pheu Thai, due to obstruction by the junta-appointed Senate, leading to political gridlock. This is a classic prisoner’s dilemma: both parties could not form a government pact, faced defection from their partner, and thus lost their chance to form a post-authoritarian transition government—the optimal outcome. Confronted with such a political crisis and establishment pressure —or arguably, a deal with the establishment—Pheu Thai pragmatically formed an unusual alliance with its historic junta rivals, sending strong signals to its partisan voters that its pro-reform, pro-democratic traditions were largely abandoned.
According to Noam Lupu’s theory of party breakdown—which in my opinion could well apply to Pheu Thai—the party faces a high chance of collapsing in future elections. First, the party’s brand as pro-poor, pro-democracy, and pro-reform has been diluted. When Pheu Thai, previously positioned as a pro-democracy force alongside Move Forward during the junta period, formed a government with royalist and junta parties after the May 2023 elections, large segments of pro-democracy and partisan voters detached from the party. They became less able to differentiate Pheu Thai from other clientelistic, royalist, and junta alliance parties, signaling that it had become more compromised or aligned with the establishment and opposed to deep economic and political reforms.
Second, as a coalition with weak capacity to control its partners and prevent fragmentation, the Pheu Thai-led government seems not only less able to deliver pro-democracy, anti-junta, and deeply reform policies as promised during its election campaigns but also appears to perform poorly economically amid global instability and Thailand’s chronic issues stemming from long-term political turmoil. Thus, Pheu Thai struggles to achieve consensus among voters on valence issues like economic prosperity or anti-corruption. Its longtime voters are uncertain about the party’s new positions and may shift their support to other parties in the next election. These conditions—where the Pheu Thai’s brand is diluted, long-term voter partisanship erodes, and the government performs poorly—set the stage for voters to defect en masse, potentially leading to party breakdown.
Sretta Thavisin, Thaksin Shinawatra and Paetongtarn Shinawatra pictured together on 13 December 2024 (Photo: Pheu Thai on Facebook)
Opportunities amid repression
Amidst ongoing repression, there is no shortcut to a solution. Movements and parties must prioritise building strong organisational and network infrastructures, cultivating quality leadership, and organising strong relationships with their constituencies.
For progressive, movement-based parties—particularly the People’s Party, which emerged from and recruited heavily within the social movement sector—it is crucial to focus on building a mobilisational infrastructure. This includes developing organisations, networks, and leadership to sustain the social movement sector and its overlapping party network, thereby maintaining or expanding their capacity and ensuring long-term survival. Scholars have warned that when parties recruit extensively from the movement sector without organising new leadership and contributing back to the movements, both entities risk becoming weak and facing deinstitutionalisation over time.
However, in the prolonged repressive environment, the focus on organisational and infrastructural building seems secondary to other immediate tasks. After the previous ban, Move Forward devoted its limited resources to parliamentary work rather than building grassroots networks, expanding constituencies, and cultivating young leadership—which were once a priority for Future Forward. Social movements also allocated their limited resources to urgent campaigns, such as releasing activists from prison, campaigning for amnesty laws, constitutional amendments, and other rights-based agendas.
Amid repression, funding scarcity, and the retreat of funders from Thailand and Southeast Asia to other regions or their home countries—as is expected under the second Trump administration in the US—movement organisations often prioritise frontline campaign work over long-term goals like leadership development or infrastructure building.Without access to state resources, it is difficult for social movements and the People’s Party to focus on building mobilisational infrastructures. Consequently, due to state repression, both People’s Party activists and social movement activists tend to develop tunnel vision, failing to recognise how their infrastructures are intertwined and mutually dependent. Instead, they operate as if in separate spheres, which undermines their goals of rights-based reforms, democratisation, and long-term survival.
Amid ongoing and worsening brand dilution, Pheu Thai requires a comprehensive reinvention to survive potential breakdown. The party may anticipate this; it has established a new task force of young professionals, the Pheu Thai Academy, to lead institutionalisation efforts, strengthen programmatic positions, build future leaders, enhance parliamentary work, and innovate new policies.
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Moreover, party elites of both Pheu Thai and the People’s Party—particularly older politicians nearing the end of their careers, those who will soon be banned, and political stars—tend to focus on short-term, electoral gains and appealing to median voters, rather than on long-term capacity building and constituency interests that link the party to its social base. In contrast, grassroots party activists and younger leaders, especially those accountable to specific constituencies like local movements or civic groups, tend to strategically focus on long-term visions such as party building and expanding the party’s base. These two groups can conflict over strategies, and party leaders often have veto power, naturally leaning toward immediate electoral gains over infrastructural investment.
While the People’s Party’s decision-making tends to increasingly emphasise short-term electoral gains, the rank and file—particularly activists connected to social movements, those involved in the Progressive Movement Foundation (the party’s social movement wing), or those in the party’s organising units like the Common School—focus on organising work that builds youth leadership and cultivates the necessary relationships for developing mobilisational infrastructure. However, these units are currently too small to significantly impact party and movement building and are not prioritised by the party.
Conclusion: preparing for change
In Southeast Asia, authoritarian forces often use a democratic façade to conceal their true nature. These hybrid regimes hold elections to present the appearance of democracy while continuing to operate autocratically. This strategy grants them legitimacy, and regional powers like the United States and China often remain silent, prioritising their political and economic interests to expand their spheres of influence. It is no surprise, therefore, that regimes like the establishment-controlled one in Thailand or the Tatmadaw in Myanmar aim to hold elections to disguise autocratic rule under a democratic veneer.
However much democratic forces are disadvantaged in such circumstances, they must focus on building strong organisational and mobilisational infrastructures. This approach will ensure that, in both the short and long term, they can stand independently and seize opportunities for genuine democratic transitions and consolidation when circumstances allow. Without prioritising the development of robust organisational and network infrastructures, movements and parties rarely achieve their shared objectives of democratisation and the advancement of rights amidst repression.
