by JACOB RICKS
On 19 July 2023, more than two months after his party won the largest number of seats in the general election, Move Forward Party’s prime ministerial candidate Pita Limjaroenrat lost his second and likely last shot at becoming prime minister.
In a double-barrelled onslaught, the Constitutional Court suspended him from duties as a member of parliament just as parliament began debating whether to allow his renomination for prime minister. Unsurprisingly, the parliamentary vote — which included the junta-appointed senate — went against Pita. While it could be argued that these events were foreseeable and that Pita’s fate was sealed long before last Wednesday, they did shift Thailand’s political landscape to further empower conservative actors.
The 2017 constitution, designed by the military junta that directly ruled the country from the 2014 coup until the 2019 election, was written specifically to prevent elected politicians from obtaining power without at least the tacit approval of the conservative coup group and their supporters. The junta-appointed senate’s role in voting for the prime minister raises the majority threshold from 251 seats in the 500-seat elected House of Representatives to 376 seats in the combined 750-seat parliament. This effectively gives the senate veto power over any prime ministerial candidate.
But parliament did not vote on Pita’s candidacy on 19 July. Instead, the opposition raised a parliamentary rule that prohibits the resubmission of a rejected motion within the same parliamentary session. They argued that since parliament had already rejected Pita on 13 July, he could not be renominated. After eight hours of tense debate, including Pita’s dramatic exit from parliament after the Constitutional Court ruling, the vote fell largely along coalition lines with 395 parliamentarians opposing his renomination and 312 supporting it. Most opposing votes came from the senate.
This sets a troubling, potentially unconstitutional, precedent. The next prime ministerial vote has been postponed (again) as parliament waits for the Constitutional Court to weigh in. If the decision stands, it means that any prime ministerial candidate has only one shot at establishing a government. The implications of this are multi-fold.
One implication is that the decision increases the stakes of submitting a prime ministerial candidate’s name for a vote, with no second chance to carry out negotiations or horse-trading after gauging support for the candidate. As constitutional rules limit potential prime ministerial candidates to those who have been pre-nominated by parties that won at least 25 seats in parliament, there are now only three potential names eligible in the coalition formerly led by Move Forward, all of whom are from the Pheu Thai party.
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