Thailand: heading for a 'political inferno'?

When Thailand's opposition Move Forward Party triumphed in last year's elections, it looked like a "watershed" moment for the country, said Thitinan Pongsudhirak in Nikkei Asia (Tokyo). The party had promised to reform the powerful monarchy, and looked ready to end years of stultifying rule by the generals who'd taken power in a 2014 coup.

It wasn't to be. Move Forward was blocked from forming a government by the senate, the members of which had been appointed by the junta. Last week, things got even worse when Thailand's constitutional court ordered the party dissolved and banned its leaders from politics for a decade, said Pravit Rojanaphruk on Khaosod (Bangkok). The decision is a hammer blow for the 14 million people who voted for change last year, and makes a mockery of the idea that this nation of 71.8 million is a proper democracy.

Thai politics are often turbulent, said Sui-Lee Wee and Muktita Suhartono in The New York Times . In recent decades, they've been dominated by clashes between the "entrenched royalist military establishment", which holds elections to preserve a veneer of democracy, and reformist forces allied to Thaksin Shinawatra , a billionaire populist who was PM from 2001 to 2006. The tensions came to a head in 2020, when millions joined protests demanding reforms to their nation's draconian lèse-majesté law against insulting the monarchy.

The law is arguably the world's strictest of its kind, said The Economist . Thailand's king, Maha Vajiralongkorn, is the world's richest ruler with an estimated net worth upwards of $30bn, and the law does not take kindly to insults against him, which are broadly defined (people can be charged for wearing a top similar to the king's) and carry up to 15 years in jail. What's more, anyone can accuse anyone else of falling foul of the law, and the police are bound to investigate it – a tactic often used to harass opposition figures. The law is "crying out" for reform, but when Move Forward proposed doing just that, it was accused of wanting to overthrow the monarchy, a charge that formed the basis of last week's absurd ruling.

This story is all too familiar in Thailand, said The Bangkok Post . More than 120 political parties have been disbanded since 1998, and some 249 candidates have been prevented from running. Even so, this decision feels more momentous than previous ones, given the appalling state of the economy, said Maria Stöhr in Der Spiegel (Hamburg). As the last two elections have demonstrated, the nation is desperate for change. Move Forward saw this ban coming, said Sebastian Strangio in The Diplomat (Washington), and has already enacted plans to regroup as the People's Party. Before the ruling, the party's leader, a Harvard graduate named Pita Limjaroenrat, warned that a ban would lead to a "political inferno". It would take a brave punter to bet against that prediction coming true.