Thailand’s Bhumjaithai party has triumphed in the country’s general election, becoming the first conservative party to prevail at the polls since 1996, with projections showing the party winning nearly 200 of the 500 seats in the House of Representatives.
According to preliminary results released by Thailand’s Election Commission late yesterday, Bhumjaithai was projected to win about 197 seats, ahead of 112 for the progressive People’s Party, and 78 for the once-dominant Pheu Thai party.
“We are likely to take first place in the election,” Anutin told reporters at his party headquarters in Bangkok, as per the AFP news agency. “The victory today belongs to all Thais, no matter whether you voted for us or not.”
While the exact complexion of the new government remains to be seen, the relative success of the newcomer Kla Tham Party, which was projected to win 57 seats, almost certainly gives Anutin the support necessary to lead the next government. According to a report by Shawn Crispin of Asia Times, the most likely outcome at this stage appears to be a coalition between Bhumjaithai, Pheu Thai, and Kla Tham, “with all three parties posturing as pro-establishment while rooted deeply in provincial patronage networks.” It is also possible that Bhumjaithai and Kla Tham will have the numbers necessary to form a government on their own.
The election result marks the graduation of Bhumjaithai from dark-horse kingmaker to national political powerhouse. Founded in 2008, the party won 71 seats at the 2023 election, and just 51 in 2019. It caps off a similarly sharp rise for Anutin, the scion of a construction conglomerate who was previously best known for spearheading the legalization of marijuana in 2022, while public health minister.
Anutin was appointed prime minister at the head of a minority government in September, after the dismissal from office of Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and the collapse of her Pheu Thai-led government. He is now set to become the first Thai prime minister to be returned to office in two decades – a reflection both of the magnitude of his victory and the chronic instability that has affected Thai politics since the overthrow of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a coup in 2006.
According to early analyses of the result, Bhumjaithai’s success likely came down to its ability to harness the nationalist sentiments created by the ongoing border conflict with Cambodia and to forge alliances with the provincial political clans known as baan yaai, or “big houses.” The latter enabled it to outperform expectations in the 400 House constituencies whose representatives are elected via a first-past-the-post system. (The remaining 100 seats are allocated based on each party’s share of the national vote.)
The Orange Wave Peters Out
Equally, the election result will come as a disappointment for the People’s Party (PP). Prior to the election, most public opinion surveys suggested that the party was the preferred choice of the Thai electorate, for both constituency and party-list seats, while its leader, 38-year-old Natthaphong Ruengpanyawut, led most polls of preferred prime minister.
At the last election in 2023, the People’s Party’s predecessor, the Move Forward Party (MFP), defied predictions and came in first, winning 151 seats in the House. It was subsequently blocked from forming the government by military-appointed members of the Senate and later dissolved by the Constitutional Court over its pledge to amend Thailand’s severe lese-majeste law. But the PP, which was established as the successor to the MFP, was optimistic about its chances of building on its success and possibly forming Thailand’s next government.
However, as I noted in my election preview last week, the political environment has changed in several respects that have disadvantaged the progressive forces. The 2023 election, which took place in the wake of the campaign of youth-led protests that rocked Thailand’s large cities in 2021 and 2021, was dominated by a stark ideological choice between the status quo represented by the military-backed Prayut Chan-o-cha government and the reformist vision of the MFP.
This year, the choice has been muddied by the dire state of the Thai economy, which seems to have diluted the appeal of the PP’s ideological program, and the outbreak of war with Cambodia last year, which strengthened the prestige of the Royal Thai Army and complicated progressives’ calls for military reform.
By dissolving parliament in mid-December, while the conflict was at its height, Anutin was able to wrap himself in the flag and harness the nationalistic passions stirred up by the conflict, which was a prominent theme of the Bhumjaithai election campaign. “I promise you I will protect our soil with my life,” he told the crowd at a rally last week in Bangkok, according to the BBC. “If you want a prime minister the enemy cannot intimidate, choose my party.”
The PP struggled to maintain the balance between expressing patriotic sentiments and maintaining its promises to curb the power of the Thai military and the royalist establishment, which were the basis of the MFP’s appeal in 2023. In the end, the party was forced to abandon its plan to amend the lese-majeste law and soften its rhetoric on military reform. However, while the party could never hope to “outdo” Anutin in its nationalism, the journalist Pravit Rojanaphruk noted that its tack to the center also deprived it of “sharp, emotionally resonant issues” that it could use to mobilize support. The party did manage to win every seat in Bangkok, the first time in Thai history that a party has done so, but its pitch seemed to have limited purchase beyond the capital.
As Titipol Phakdeewanich, a political scientist from Ubon Ratchathani University, told AFP, “Nation, religion and monarchy – those were the key elements of Thainess that Bhumjaithai symbolized for many voters.” None of this was helped by the fact that Natthaphong, a self-described introvert, lacks much of the charisma of Pita Limjaroenrat, who led the MFP into the 2023 election.
Compounding the sense of missed opportunity is the role that the PP played in aiding Anutin’s rise. It supported Anutin’s bid to form a government last year, while remaining in opposition, on the condition that he agree to amend the constitution and dissolve parliament within four months.
While the party’s leadership was expecting that a snap election would redound to its benefit, the decision was a risky miscalculation that ceded the political initiative to Anutin. Once in office, and armed with the advantages of incumbency, the 59-year-old managed to convince more than 60 former MPs from rural areas to join Bhumjaithai and, as Ken Lohatepanont noted in a prescient article in December, secured alliances with powerful baan yai, particularly in the north of Thailand.
As Joshua Kurlantzick of the Council on Foreign Relations noted late yesterday, Bhumjaithai “did a great job in the campaign period of picking up support from power brokers in rural areas, and getting commitments to constituency seats, while the People’s Party neglected this aspect.” He added that a minor resurgence for the Democrat Party under former Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva also cut into the PP’s totals in southern Thailand.
The PP has accepted the result and will enter opposition, along with the Democrats, which is set to win around 20 seats.
“We acknowledge that we did not come first,” Natthaphong told reporters at his party headquarters in Bangkok, AFP reported. “We stand by our principle of respecting the party that finishes first and its right to form the government.”
Exeunt Thaksin?
The election also marks a further decline in the fortunes of Pheu Thai, the political machine of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whose parties, prior to 2023, had won every Thai election dating back to 2001. Yesterday, the party saw its share of House seats fall from 141 to around 78, as it slid from second to third place. Remarkably, it also failed to win any constituency seats in Chiang Mai, the hometown of the Shinawatras.
While Pheu Thai managed to form the government in 2023, this required a “grand bargain” with conservative and military-backed parties that also secured Thaksin’s return to Thailand after more than 15 years in self-exile. This alienated some of the party’s anti-establishment “red shirt” voters, who accused the Shinawatra clan of prioritizing its own interests over those of its loyal supporters.
At the same time, the party and its patriarch remained the subject of suspicion by many conservatives, who did not hesitate to undermine the party’s hold on power – especially as the border dispute with Cambodia escalated in late 2024 and early 2025. In the end, Paetongtarn, Thaksin’s daughter, was removed from office for her mishandling of the conflict, after the leaking of a recorded phone call that she held with influential former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, during which she pleaded for a resolution of the border conflict and criticized the Thai military.
The fall of Paetongtarn, along with the imprisonment of her father on old corruption charges around the same time, appeared to mark the end of the grand bargain between Pheu Thai and the conservative establishment. (If Pheu Thai joins the next government, it will be doing so very much as the junior partner.) Whether it also comes to be seen as the beginning of the end of the Shinawatras’ two-decade-long domination of Thai politics remains to be seen.
One positive outcome of Bhumjaithai’s decision victory, as much of the business press has noted, is that it may create the stability that will calm investors and give Thailand’s political class the space necessary to begin undertaking much-needed economic reforms. As Napon Jatusripitak, a political scientist at the Bangkok-based Thailand Future think-tank, told Reuters, “for the first time in a long time, we will likely have a government that has sufficient effective power to govern.”
Whether it addresses the longer-term political challenges facing Thailand is less certain. While yesterday’s election saw the progressive “orange wave” peter out, the underlying issue that drove its strong performance in 2023 – the sclerotic nature of the Thai political establishment and the country’s lopsided distribution of wealth and power – suggests that more cycles of political contention are in Thailand’s future.
