Thaksin-Linked Party Vows to Rewrite Constitution as Thai Vote Nears

Patpicha Tanakasempipat
·2 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-Ocha appealed to voters to back his bid to retain power as the Southeast Asian nation kicked off the election process with candidates registering to contest next month’s poll.

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Prayuth, who has been in power since leading a coup in 2014, led his United Thai Nation Party candidates to register for the May 14 election in Bangkok on Monday. Representatives of other parties also began filing their candidacy for what’s shaping up to be a battle between pro-democracy groups and pro-establishment parties.

“You have to choose a party or a candidate who can manage the country’s crisis,” Prayuth, who is his party’s top prime minister candidate, told Thairath TV in an interview. “It’s not about promises but whether they can be achieved. And who has done it before? Me.”

Even though the constitution will limit his stay in office to another two years, Prayuth said it would still be a valuable period for him and his party leader Pirapan Salirathavibhaga would be ready to take over from him.

Thailand’s biggest political party Pheu Thai, linked to ousted former premier Thaksin Shinawatra, pledged to rewrite the nation’s military-drafted constitution if it wins the election. The promise is part of the party’s six-point road map to restore “democracy” unveiled over the weekend.

The party, which is leading in pre-poll opinion surveys, said it will also propose an anti-coup bill alongside the charter process. To reform the military, the party said it will abolish conscription and make services voluntary as a first step to keeping the army out of politics and ending the cycle of coups.

Although pre-election surveys project opposition parties holding an edge, the rules are stacked in favor of military-backed groups. That’s because the 2017 constitution gives the 250-member Senate, comprising mostly of establishment allies, the power to vote alongside the lower house until 2024 to pick the next prime minister.

Pheu Thai, which is bidding to win more than 300 seats in the 500-member House of Representatives, enjoys nearly 50% approval rating in recent opinion polls. Thaksin-linked parties have won the most seats in every election since 2001, only to be unseated from government by the army or the courts. The party is rooted in poor, rural regions in the north and northeast and has long riled Thailand’s urban establishment and royalist elite.

More than 52 million voters will elect lower house members in a return to the two-ballot system that will see 400 seats up for grab in a nationwide first-past-the-post race and 100 being alloted based on the proportion of votes that each party receives.

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