BANGKOK – Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha will live to rule another day with a highly anticipated Constitutional Court ruling on the legality of his tenure under constitutionally mandated eight-year term limits. But the end of his strongman era is now more clearly, though not decisively, in sight.
Amid tight security, opposition protests and fears of violence, the nine-judge court ruled on September 30 that the ex-army commander’s legal tenure started in April 2017, when the kingdom’s current constitution was enacted, and not when he seized power in a 2014 coup or was elected as prime minister after 2019 general elections.
An opposition petition submitted to the court argued his rule should count from August 2014, when he was formally made prime minister of a coup regime after toppling a democratically elected government in May that year.
The prime minister’s proponents argued alternatively for 2017 or 2019. Friday’s ruling may thus be perceived as a Thai-style legal compromise to defuse political tensions in the run-up to next year’s elections.
The ruling will allow Prayut, who also serves as defense minister, to resume his premiership duties after a five-week suspension imposed while the court weighed the case. That will allow him to preside over the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit to be staged in mid-November in Bangkok with world leaders in attendance, which may or may not serve as a ceremonial capstone to his rule.
Preparations for the event will likely keep a lid on political noise in the weeks ahead. But how the royalist soldier views the ruling – including if he believes it was somehow manufactured by a faction of traditional conservative elites who are known to favor a new face to front their interests at 2023 elections – will have an unspoken bearing on stability and instability in the run-up to those polls.
One group of senior conservative elites, more associated with the previous than current king, had asked Prayut in writing before his suspension to put the nation before himself and refrain from contesting the next general election to make way for a more electable, civilian candidate to champion the conservative cause.
It’s not clear to observers if that group, consisting of a former prime minister, foreign minister and perhaps even representatives of major business conglomerates, had any influence over the Constitutional Court, a bastion of royalist conservative power independent of but usually aligned with the military establishment.
One diplomat familiar with the situation says Prayut had threatened to dissolve parliament in response to his face-losing suspension but was “told from above” that a snap dissolution wasn’t viable. New coup rumors are also doing the rounds in diplomatic circles, though it’s not clear at this juncture who may be tempted to coup whom.
Prayut’s five-week absence was filled by Deputy Prime Minister Prawit Wongsuwan, his (usually) trusted colleague and former superior in the military’s hierarchy. Prawit did not occupy Prayut’s personal office during his limited time at the helm, but his circle and entourage of aides reportedly moved in with gusto at the Venetian-style Government House.
Critics say Prawit’s “acting” prime minister designation was a misnomer with widely circulated images of him asleep in the chair during an official event in the southern province of Krabi, while at the same time ringing alarms with comments he made that appeared to indicate he was pressuring the Bank of Thailand to firm up the falling baht currency.
The Constitutional Court ruling, which hard-caps Prayut’s eligibility as prime minister to April 6, 2025, or less than halfway through the next elected government’s four-year term, deepens the military-linked Palang Pracharat Party’s (PPRP) electoral dilemma amid recent opinion polls and by-elections that show its popularity is firmly on the wane.
That’s all working to the advantage of Peua Thai, the main opposition party shadow-led by self-exiled ex-PM Thaksin Shinawatra and his family clan.
A June poll widely cited in international and local media and panned as flawed by the premier showed that Thaksin’s political novice daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, was preferred over Prayut as prime minister by a more than two-to-one margin (25.28% to 11.68%).
She has predicted a “landslide” Peua Thai win at the next election and more controversially indicated, if elected, she would seek to bring her criminally convicted father back from self-exile – a lightning-rod proposal last advanced by Thaksin’s then-PM sister Yingluck that set off the chain of events that eventuated in the 2014 military putsch.
Diplomats who have recently spoken to Peua Thai insiders say the party may instead ultimately run Sansiri property magnate Srettha Thavisin, known for his intimate ties to Yingluck, as its candidate – a scenario Thaksin hinted at when he said recently Paetongtarn’s mother would ultimately decide whether she is allowed to run for prime minister.
For its part, PPRP may already be weighing a Prayut + Prawit, 2+2 year ticket, where the former serves the first two years and the latter the last two of a second PPRP-led coalition. Whether that old-soldier formula would capture the electorate’s imagination isn’t clear – though PPRP widely outperformed expectations by winning the most votes, though not seats, with Prayut as its strongman face in 2019.
At the same time, there are early hints PPRP may already have another, more business-oriented candidate in mind. Observers note Gulf Energy CEO Sarath Ratanavadi, the nation’s second-richest man with known personal ties to King Maha Vajiralongkorn and a past PPRP benefactor, has raised his until now publicity-shy profile by giving interviews to Bloomberg, including on hot political issues like the baht’s collapse, since Prayut’s suspension.
Others foresee a potential grand conservative bargain with Bhumjaithai party leader and Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, the mastermind behind the kingdom’s reefer madness marijuana boom, to keep Peua Thai at bay. Bhumjaithai is already recruiting and campaigning heavily in the provinces, and has reportedly even offered future top positions to politicians – both from PPRP and Peua Thai – who switch to its side.
Yet others foresee a 2023 election scenario where the vote is so evenly distributed among PPRP, Peua Thai and Bhumjaithai that the vote for prime minister, where the military-appointed 250-member Senate will still serve as kingmaker, results in a hung parliament, opening the legal way for an outside royally appointed prime minister.
That highly speculative scenario favors the massively popular, can-do Bangkok Governor Chadchart Sittipunt, who many see as ideal for bridging the kingdom’s political divide with his links to Thaksin’s Peua Thai and also his family’s staunchly conservative background, including a close relation who until 2016 served on the royal advisory Privy Council.
An early but inconclusive reading of Friday’s ruling is that the path has been cleared for Prayut to step away from politics gracefully when his elected tenure ends next year and dedicate himself more fully to protecting the crown as president of King Vajiralongkorn’s Privy Council, an apex position for which many observers believe he has been groomed.
Observers note that’s how now-deceased former prime minister and ex-army commander Prem Tinsulanonda played his political cards after stepping down after eight years in the premiership (1980-88). Prem grew the appointed body into a formidable power center with parallels to the ancient upatham, or vice-king, palace tradition under Bhumibol.
The advisory body has lost much of that power and autonomy with Prem’s demise and Vajiralongkorn’s rise, with some insiders now even referring to it as hong yen, or cold room, under current president and likewise ex-army commander Surayud Chulanont. Whether Prayut perceives he could reaffirm the council’s royal power and prestige in the new palatial configuration will likely determine if he opts to run or retire in 2023.