Out with the old, in with the new: Move Forward Party’s leader and prime ministerial candidate Pita posing during an election campaign event in Bangkok. — Reuters
University student Supawut Presangeiam is eager to vote for the first time in a general election tomorrow, hoping that his support for a rising youth-led opposition party will change the country by moving away from old patronage politics.
“I have decided to vote for Move Forward,” the 19-year-old said.
“For too long we have compromised, trying to change the system gradually, but what Move Forward wants to do is to challenge the patronage system.”
He is among the 3.3 million first-time voters, aged 18 to 22, that parties are trying to woo.
An emphasis on young voters comes three years after student-led protests rocked Thailand by challenging the military’s longtime influence over politics and – in a shocking development – even questioned the role of the king in society, a subject previously deeply taboo.
Move Forward was not officially part of the student protests but some activists are running as party candidates and many are party workers.
Its progressive campaign platform incorporates many of the protesters’ demands including, most controversially, amending a criminal law that makes insulting the king punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
Other protest demands that Move Forward has adopted include re-writing the constitution to limit the power of the military, scraping military conscription and replacing appointed provincial governors with elected ones.
A late surge in the polls for Move Forward and its youthful leader Pita Limjaroenrat, 42, shows that some of the ethos of the protests seems to have spilled into the wider electorate, tired of old divisions that have racked the country over the past nearly two decades.
Voters aged 18 to 26 make up about 14% of the electorate, but Move Forward has recently been polling at about 34%, indicating it is winning the support of not just the young.
“Now our supporters come from all groups,” said the party’s deputy leader, Nattawut Buaprathum.
“This is an opportunity for us to be in government and truly represent the people.”
But the party leading most polls, on about 38%, is another opposition party, Pheu Thai, founded by self-exiled billionaire former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, whose populist, pro-poor governments have been ousted in two military coups.
Thaksin’s daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, is Pheu Thai’s leading candidate for prime minister.
For some voters, Move Forward offers a new direction from the years of binary confrontation between the conservative establishment, with its networks of patronage, and Pheu Thai that has at times brought bloody turmoil.
Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, said the new ideas championed by younger voters may be resonating more broadly and expanding Move Forward’s appeal.
“The battleground has moved from populism to structural reform ... Move Forward have the new agenda,” said Thitinan, noting that Move Forward and Pheu Thai were running neck and neck in many areas. — Reuters
