“What is an ideology?” This was a question that Dr. Trairong Suwankiri, a former deputy prime minister, rhetorically posed to the audience at the United Thai Nation Party event earlier this month where Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha was unveiled as the party’s standard-bearer. “An ideology,” he explained, “is the general direction a political party wants to take the nation to safeguard its future for the next generation.”
This is not the standard Oxford Dictionary definition of an ideology. But it is useful enough. In a country where several parties seem entirely devoid of guiding principles beyond the pursuit of power, and many politicians espouse only platitudes about development when asked about their own beliefs, it is helpful that Trairong is, at the very least, thinking in ideological terms.
Then, however, Trairong commenced an epic polemic.
He lashed out against the “great powers” that he accused of “trying to turn us into running dogs” and interfering in Thailand’s internal affairs. “They want to do anything they can,” he declared, “to indoctrinate our youth so that they hate this nation.” He decried a “crisis of morality” that he said was enveloping the bureaucratic and political system. Wearing a grey shirt and a black jacket, he said they represented the influence of grey money and dark money that bad politicians have allowed to run amok. And the reason that “low-quality politicians” get elected, he noted, is because “people do not use their brains” while voting.
Trairong concluded with the pronouncement that he was supporting Prayut for a return to the premiership because he is “a good person, honest, and clean. No other party leader can be compared to him.”
The automatic comparison we make of the role that UTN currently plays is to Palang Pracharath in 2019, for both were the vehicles of choice for Prayut in the respective general elections. Yet there is a key difference. PPRP has never been a truly ideological party, given its automatic designation as the natural party of government, albeit in a warped system, since its foundation. It attracted a motley crew of ex-Thaksinites and former Democrats, former enemies bound together by the knowledge that the Senate guaranteed them power. The PPRP cares about the preservation of a system that favors them, but what do its members have in common beyond that? We would be hard pressed to say. Hence the reason the PPRP is widely described as a phuk chapor kij — a “mission-specific” party.
This was an accusation that Trairong immediately sought to dispel for his new venture. A phuk chapor kij this is not; the UTN is very much an ideological project. Indeed, a glance at the party’s roster should not surprise anyone that it is much more coherent in its beliefs. The party’s secretary-general was a key PDRC protest leader and its executives were drawn from parties such as Democrats and Ruam Palang (founded by Suthep Thaugsuban). Of course, there are still some notable converts: Setsakol Atthawong is a member, a red shirt leader who once composed a song called “Loyalty to Thaksin” but is now a born-again diehard Prayut supporter.
Indeed, there was not a shadow of doubt left about what ideology the United Thai Nation Party wanted to display by allowing Trairong to give this speech on their biggest stage so far. It was a rendition of the greatest hits of recent Thai conservatism.
For one, there was the paranoia of a foreign desire to change Thailand’s system of government: a convenient scapegoat for our own domestic instability. There was an intense suspicion of democracy and elected politicians, a long-running theme ever since Thaksin began dominating the Thai political scene. There was the despair at the “nation-hating” youth. And there was a nod to the monopoly over popularity that General Prayut has among the Thai right, rendering him virtually the only conservative candidate with any degree of viability. All of this are now mainstays of conservative social media.
Perhaps one could argue that this is par for the course. Of course a party that wants to appeal to a conservative base needs to say conservative things. But we must also notice that there is a difference in degree. The PPRP did not open their election campaign in 2019 with such a nationalist or conservative flair; neither did the Democrats. Indeed, Abhisit Vejjajiva launched the Democrats’ campaign in 2019 by emphasizing that the party is founded on “the belief in liberal democracy.” It is difficult to imagine either party allowing their campaign launch to be overshadowed by such a radically conservative and conspiratorial speech.
To be sure, it is not the case that the PPRP and the Democrats were not in their own ways conservative parties. But they are also both big-tent parties, where politicians of various stripes coexisted. The PPRP were originally led by the “Four Sons” team of technocrats; they were hardly ideologues. The Democrats once housed everyone from the current leaders of the UTN to its socially progressive young candidates. There is no sign yet, however, that the UTN is such a big tent. The party is more comparable to Suthep Thaugsuban’s Ruam Palang Party, formed as the incarnation of the PDRC protest spirit into the form of a political party. Except, unlike Ruam Palang, it has a shot at attaining real power.
Is it fair to extrapolate from this speech by Trairong? My response would be: if the party wished to repudiate his point of view, it would not post a summary of his speech on their Facebook page. It marks, instead, a rightward shift in Thailand’s political terms of debate. No more of the pledges for democracy and the cosmopolitan airs of the British-educated Democrats, or the half-Thaksinite shades of the PPRP. The UTN is a real, breathing organization that has consolidated a key strand of Thai conservatism into a major political party.
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The problem that faces any long-governing political party is the fact that at some point, there is no one else left to blame for the country’s ills. Trairong’s speech was notable for its negativity; to him, all under heaven is in turmoil. His emphasis on the woes that plague the country was so heavy that one almost has to wonder who has been in charge for the past eight years, allowing such a mess to accumulate.
The ultraconservatism UTN displayed on stage is inherently negative in mood: so besieged is the nation by foreign forces and evil politicians, so ill the body politic, that it has little time to talk about hope and change. Fundamentally reactive to enemies real and imagined, it is permanently defensive. But politicians in power painting such a dark picture of the times will always run the risk of placing the blame on themselves. When you represent the status quo, running against the status quo is always bound to look more than slightly confusing.
And that is the bind that UTN finds itself placed in. It knows that there is dissatisfaction, and it wants to say that things will change. But with Prayut, it has no message for change. It cannot plausibly seek to represent reform, because the prime minister has had eight years to enact reform. It cannot appeal to democratic ideals, because its standard bearer terminated democracy. And can it even truly claim to be a good protector of the traditional institutions it holds dear, when it is under this prime minister’s rule that these institutions have come under the most severe of challenges?
It is true that in his speech, Prayut emphasized that he is running for prime minister again because he wants to ensure the country can move forward and that he has unfinished business. But Prayut’s vision for the country in his remaining two years received scant attention during the entire event. As Saksith Saiyasombut of Channel News Asia noted, the event was “light on what the party is actually going to do instead of banging on conservative state ideology.”
The lack of a forward-looking focus at such a launch event hurts in more ways than one. Most importantly, it leads one to question whether this is a party that is entirely bereft of new ideas. This is an own goal. Even analysts who are not fans of Prayut should be able to concede that his government has also racked up a number of real accomplishments. His government has expanded the social safety net, brought several important infrastructure projects to fruition, and made notable progress in building digital government platforms. All of this got a shout-out in a brief video, but that was it.
In fairness to the UTN, it is still early and other parties are only beginning to launch their campaign proposals. But should a party that says it is laser-focused on solving the nation’s lingering problems not give at least more airtime to what it intends to do with power? How will it jump-start economic growth, anemic ever since Prayut became prime minister? How will it continue restructuring Thailand’s economy so that it becomes more innovative and competitive, a task that two Prayut administrations have grappled at with mixed success? And how will it reform Thailand’s education system, something everyone agrees is not up to the task and which eight years has produced no notable achievements?
The Democrats have already launched an array of agricultural policies. Palang Pracharath has focused on a further expansion of welfare credits. Chart Thai Pattana has made environmentalism a key plank of its agenda. Chart Pattana Kla zeroed in on debt system reform. Sang Anakot Thai’s Somkid Jatusripitak is focused almost entirely on economic policy. What is, to borrow Trairong’s phrase, the direction that the UTN wants to take the country, to safeguard its future for the next generation?
There is plenty of opportunity for UTN to correct this as the campaign continues. Obviously, the party will launch its policies at some point, and I hope to be proven wrong: perhaps they will wow with their policy proposals. But the empty nationalism of its launch is a concerning signal for how it intends to focus its campaign.
The UTN also showed no path towards winning the hearts and minds of the “nation-hating” youth that the party has made clear is a problem. For a party whose name emphasizes unity, Trairong’s speech felt deeply divisive. There were no hints of accommodating different perspectives in a democratic society. Perhaps this is because there is also no real existential threat left to conservative ideology. The protest movement of 2020, after all, has been largely extinguished, its reach confined to the echo chambers of social media.
Yet without providing a forward-looking conservatism that both provides a path to economic competitiveness and the safeguarding of democratic rights, the protestors look like they represent a ticking time bomb rather than a challenge gone for good. In the meantime, the Prayut administration only has band-aid solutions. The only long-term answer it recently devised seems to be separating history from the rest of the social sciences curriculum. I harbor my doubts on whether that will cut it.
Anand Panyarachun is sometimes called the best prime minister that Thailand never elected.
At a talk, I once heard Anand call himself a “radical conservative.” His conservatism is easy to recognize: born to an aristocratic family, he is proudly royalist. His radicalism, however, was not something that I understood at the time. To be a radical conservative almost sounds like an oxymoron.
In time, however, I came to understood what underpinned his self-professed radicalism. It was a radical openness to hearing new ideas, to pushing boundaries, and a commitment to ensuring that he kept up with the times. On the anniversary of Black May last year, Anand proposed a new constitution to ensure full democracy and people’s rights. In a recent interview, he acknowledged that on the geopolitical stage Thailand has virtually ceased to exist. “We have to accept that we cannot stop change,” he said. “So how are we going to manage it?”
Unfortunately, if the speeches on stage were any guide, the UTN still appears confounded on how to manage change. They represent, instead, another kind of radical conservatism — one that is a far cry from Anand’s pragmatism.
To be sure, there were attempts at creating moderate and forward-looking conservative parties in the past few years. All have failed to take off. And the sad thing is Thai conservatism did not have to evolve this way. For the longest time, the Democrats were always known as the technocratic party, perhaps a little too focused for its own good on policy over effective communication. How things have changed.
Thailand will always need a conservative party, one that should compete on its policy disagreements with the Thaksinites and Move Forward, one that can make the case for its own beliefs. But I also believe that a more cerebral, reasonable, and — forgive me for the unfortunate American connotation — compassionate conservatism should be possible as the guiding principle of at least one major political party, one that can even resonate with younger voters.
That does not appear likely in the near future.