The country’s opposition bloc should stick together to dislodge the military from politics and form a government after the election in May, Move Forward Party leader Pita Limjaroenrat said on Saturday.
Mr Pita made the comment on the sidelines of a campaign rally that drew thousands of enthusiastic supporters to Samyan Mitrtown in Bangkok.
The May 14 election is shaping up as a contest between pro-military conservatives and the populist opposition led by the Pheu Thai Party and Move Forward. Two governments led by Pheu Thai and its predecessors were overthrown by military coups, in 2006 and 2014.
“It’s very clear that the current opposition is the right answer for the challenges being faced by Thailand, not the military-backed party that staged the coup,” Mr Pita, 42, told Reuters backstage at the rally.
He sees the alliance with Pheu Thai as vital to beating Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha after more than eight years in office.
Gen Prayut is the prime ministerial candidate of the United Thai Nation (UTN) Party but he is running third or lower in most opinion polls when voters are asked who they would like to see as prime minister. Paetongtarn Shinawatra of Pheu Thai and Mr Pita are the top two picks.
Move Forward has a strong base among urban voters, including those who joined the youth-led protest movement that emerged in 2020 to challenge the Prayut administration. Mr Pita said that support base complements Pheu Thai, backed by working people and farmers in the rural North and Northeast.
There has been endless speculation that front-running Pheu Thai, which had a good relationship with Move Forward in the now-dissolved House of Representatives, might team up with the Palang Pracharath Party (PPRP) if that emerged as the only way it could form a government after the May 14 vote.
However, Srettha Thavisin, a Pheu Thai prime ministerial candidate, declared firmly on Friday that the party had no interest in joining with either of the parties linked to the generals behind the 2014 coup — Gen Prayut and Gen Prawit Wongsuwon, the PPRP prime ministerial candidate.
Mr Pita gave his assurance that Move Forward was a force for change that could be trusted.
“Voters casting their ballots will certainly get what they want. This means, ‘If there are uncles, there is no us. If there is us, there are no uncles’,” he said. The reference apparently was to Uncle Tu and Uncle Pom, the nicknames of Gen Prayut and Gen Prawit.
Mr Pita said the alliance between pro-democracy parties is needed to overcome the outsized influence of the 250-member Senate, appointed by the military government before the last election. It will vote to pick the next prime minister along with the 500-seat House of Representatives.
In 2019, 249 senators — more than 100 of them military officers and police — voted for Gen Prayut. Some senators maintain that even if Pheu Thai wins more seats than any other party next month, they will not support its prime ministerial candidate.
“If the lower house is packed as much as possible with (those following) democratic norms and rules, we will be able to take away the conflict of the politics of the appointed upper house versus the politics of the elected lower house,” Mr Pita said.
“I am sure we will see a big change here in Thailand.”
“Election day is a choice between the dark present and a bright future,” Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, the co-founder of the Future Forward Party, the predecessor of Move Forward, told supporters at Saturday's rally.
Future Forward shocked everyone in 2019 by getting 6.3 million votes to become the country’s third-biggest party with 81 seats. But the Constitutional Court dissolved the party after ruling that a loan Mr Thanathorn made to it violated election rules.
Results of opinion polls to date suggest Move Forward might win around 25 to 30 constituency seats and a similar number of party-list seats depending on how large its popular vote is this time around.
Mr Thanathorn has been banned from running for political office for 10 years but said he was not worried about history repeating itself.
“We would start again,” he told AFP. “If the establishment dissolves our party again, they underestimate the anger of the people.”
