Name: Thailand’s surprise election results - Asia Specific podcast, BBC World Service
Uploaded: 2026-02-11T06:20:58.000Z
Duration: 19 min 19 s
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Thailand was once seen as one of the fast growing economies of Asia, fueled by factories and a booming tourism sector.

Those factories have started to pack up and go to regional rivals like Vietnam.

So one would expect that Thai voters would want to shake things up to jumpstart the economy.

But that didn't happen in the country's latest elections.

Why did voters choose status quo over change by backing pro establishment party?

After this, today's vote has given up on the idea that democracy can bring about change.

I'm Mariko in Singapore and this is Asia Pacific from the BBC World Service.

Twice a week we bring you Asia Pacific stories unpacked by those who know them best.

And today I have the BBC Southeast Asia correspondent Jonathan Head.

I also have Professor Titanampon Sudharak from Chalalongkorn University.

Thank you both for joining me on Asia Pacific.

So let's start by painting the picture, Jonathan, because you've covered many elections across the region.

You know, all the red shirts and yellow shirts and now orange and so on.

But what's been the mood over the last few weeks?

I'm always impressed by the degree of sort of sense of civic duty with which Thais go to votes, the seriousness with which they take the.

The very many choices that they're offered.

There were 57 parties taking part in this election, some of them with very eccentric agendas.

There was one chap who said he was going to go buy nuclear weapons for Thailand.

There was a Green Party that's posters were just entirely full of pictures of pets.

But for all of that, I mean, Thais do listen to policies to varying degrees.

It's always an impressive spectacle to me.

It's not as lively as some countries like the Philippines.

The Philippines, you've got so much music, so much showbiz.

The election commission has quite strict rules about what's allowed.

You're not allowed to be giving anything away.

They don't have music on, at least don't have performers on the stage, sort of entertainers.

But it is a genuinely democratic exercise to the extent that people are engaged with the process.

You get a sense that this is something the country is very used to doing.

And by and large, and there will be some criticism, but by and large, voting is also orderly.

Lots of officials to show people what to do.

To that extent, it looks like Quite a healthy democracy.

Well, let's unpack the election results because opinion polls do often get things wrong.

But this time it was really different from how many experts were predicting the results to be.

I mean, the People's Party was supposed to search ahead.

They were building on a reform drive going back to 2018, 2019, they won.

2019, they won the election in 2023 before being dissolved.

And then as a new party, People's Party had a lot of momentum.

The problem we had in the past is yellow shirts could not win an election.

They represented, they were the foot soldiers of the establishment, the conservative royal establishment.

And they went up against a taxing party machine back in the last 25, 26 years, really.

But this time, the first time that the establishments that the yellow shirts used to represent, they now have won the election behind Pum Chai Thai Party.

The color this time is blue and it's also a green color represented by Galatan Party, a medium sized party.

So together these two parties are through and through royalist establishment parties and they've won the election decisively.

Jonathan Titinan just mentioned the establishment.

You hear this word quite often in Thai politics, but what exactly does it mean?

Golly, that is the difficult question, I'm sure if you were to ask Titinan as well.

Defining it's hard because it's kind of amorphous.

I'd say Thailand is a deeply conservative country, partly because it was never colonized.

It never had that kind of radical foundational myth of resistance that many former colonized countries have.

And it has at its heart a highly revered monarchy and also very powerful monarchy, which, as you may understand, we can't talk about freely really.

There are lots of rules about the monarchy and what you can say, but

the monarchy sits on top symbolically of a hierarchy under which you've got very big businesses that dominate the economy.

You've got some of the most senior bureaucrats and judges in the system.

You've also got the military, which has a very strong, powerful, traditional partnership with the monarchy.

And together this somewhat hard to define establishment is enormously influential, often in ways we can't see.

And their influence pervades through Thai society.

You know, a nod or an instruction can often get officials lower down to follow their orders.

it has meant that Thailand has tended to veer conservative in the past and that parties that have or entities that have tried to challenge that have run up against all sorts of obstacles.

I mean Titinam mentioned then move the move forward.

The predecessor of People's Party being dissolved, the Constitutional Court has become this extraordinarily powerful conservative referee that can at a stroke dismiss prime ministers, dissolve parties, ban people from politics for all sorts of what seem like quite trivial transactions.

But nearly all of these are on the anti establishment side.

Broadly, do you think it's possible that voters kind of lost faith in the democratic election, especially what happened last time when the reformist party did well and yet wasn't allowed to govern.

Do you think some people may have just kind of given up on that idea?

I think that, you know, voter turnout this time, for example is just under 65% as opposed to 75% in 2023, 74% 2019.

So the momentum and the surge of these younger demographics has slowed and maybe thinking twice given the numbers that we have also in 2023, I think the move forward at that time they had a campaign platform based on amending, you know, really reforming the military, the monarchy, judiciary, really kind of recalibrating, rethinking, reordering Thai society and politics and economy.

It really caught traction, caught fire and they had a lot of support.

They won the election this time they cannot campaign because they were prohibited by the Constitutional Court during the ban and the dissolution of from campaigning on let's majeste amendment.

So they had to stick to kind of an anti corruption platform.

I think that the leadership shifting from PETA Limche ran rat in 2023 move forward.

Very charismatic, very cosmopolitan to Natapong.

He's very young, he's very competent, capable, but doesn't have the same kind of mass appeal.

I think a lot of the base also got upset with the party, People's Party for voting for Anutin to take office back in September in exchange for writing a new constitution.

I was going to say it's worth looking at just how well an Utin's boom Jai Thai has done.

If you go back to the 2019 election, they were then just a mid sized, very provincially based party, about 50 seats.

They could bargain to be part of a coalition.

Nearly 200 seats now, they got around 70, just over 70 at the last election.

This is a huge surge and it's worth making the Point, this is being done partly of very good campaigning and answering people's need for simple bread and butter sort of programs that can help them when they're under economic distress.

But also the biggest factor in Thai politics over the last 25 years has been Thaksin Shinawat Puartai Party, the election machine that for 20 years could not be beaten.

It did much worse than expected in the last election, but actually came second place this time.