Thai elites have long feared majoritarian politics — and, unlike their opponents, don’t foolishly splinter
We contain multitudes of contradictions: For example, we celebrate majority rule yet also tend to fear majorities. And not for nothing! History offers no shortage of examples where electorates empowered reckless leaders, weakened institutions, or eroded minority protections – as well as of minority elites blocking reform. Americans, who wrestle with all this, might look to Thailand, where last week’s election left the pro-change masses on the losing side, due to divisions.
There’s much to unpack, but first, a recap. In recent history Thai politics was shaped by the military acting in concert with the country’s traditional centers of authority: the monarchy-aligned establishment, senior bureaucracies, courts, and business elites. Periodic interventions, constitutional redesigns, an appointed Senate and judicial rulings repeatedly limited the scope of elected governments.
The most consequential challenge to this order came with the rise two decades ago of Thaksin Shinawatra, whose populist movement mobilized rural majorities. His eventual removal was justified by accusations of corruption and conflicts of interest — claims that were not entirely fabricated, though they also provided a convenient rationale for reasserting establishment control.
The simple question now underlying Thai politics — and, in different forms, many democracies — has no easy answer: What happens when a country’s establishment — its judges, generals, civil servants, business elites, academics, and, yes, highfalutin journalists — concludes that unconstrained democracy might bring not renewal but disorder? The answer is rarely tidy. Sometimes such anxieties reflect legitimate concerns about governance and institutional continuity. Sometimes they mask little more than grasping elites holding on to unfair privilege. Both can certainly be the case at the same time. Let’s examine!
Versions of this tension are hardly unique to Thailand. Benjamin Netanyahu frames judicial constraints as elite sabotage. Leaders in Hungary, Poland, and Turkey have cast any checks on power as anti-democratic obstruction. President Trump, too, faces resistance from much of America’s traditional establishment, though in a particularly American twist he enjoys strong support from segments of the business and technology elite. Few democracies fully escape this friction between electoral legitimacy and institutional authority.
I witnessed a stark example while living in Egypt, where the military in 2013 overthrew a Muslim Brotherhood government that had won a narrow majority in the country’s first post-Mubarak election a year earlier. A striking portion of the educated classes supported the intervention, driven by fear of political Islam and distrust of mass electorates in a country where roughly a fifth of adults were illiterate. It’s a persistent democratic dilemma: elites may genuinely fear instability, yet rule by force will rarely confer legitimacy.
Thailand has lived along this fault line for years — but not as a simple contest between democratic rebels and authoritarian guardians. Its defining reality has been fragmentation within the electorate broadly skeptical of prolonged military influence.
In the Feb. 8 election, the central story was division. Thailand’s anti-military electorate — large and persistent across elections — failed to consolidate behind a single political vehicle, even tactically. Its two principal poles represent distinct political traditions. On one side stands the Shinawatra-aligned Pheu Thai current, historically rooted in rural constituencies, redistributive populism, and dense patronage networks. On the other stands the People’s Party, urban-leaning and younger, animated by institutional reform, governance norms, and systemic redesign – technocratic and a little big woolly.
Together they won 41 percent of the party-list vote, outpolling the pro-military, pro-elites Bhumjaithai party, which received 31 percent – good enough for a huge parliament majority, ending reform talk for a while. Thailand’s electoral mechanics magnify this fragmentation. The mixed system, dominated by first-past-the-post constituency races, rewards cohesion and geographic efficiency rather than national vote totals. Divided reformist voters will allow a third party with a cohesive base to prevail.
Each system is different, but Western readers will recognize the challenge.
There is a massive lesson here for the British, whose system is totally first-past-the-post, inflating majorities and punish splits — yet whose politican landscape features splits on all sides, threatening an almost random result in the next election.
The Thai result also echoes distortions in American politics, where vote distribution often outweighs raw totals. Just as Democrats can accumulate overwhelming margins in urban strongholds while Republicans extract greater seat efficiency from geographically dispersed support, Thailand’s reformist parties amass votes that convert imperfectly into power. Electoral geometry, not ideological preference alone, shapes outcomes.
There’s more, as there always is. Mechanics alone do not explain the outcome. The stability-oriented vote did rise meaningfully, reflecting impatience with opposition fragmentation and prolonged instability. And part of the equation attaches to border flare-ups with Cambodia, which reinforced anxieties about security and national cohesion that advantaged Bhumjaithai’s stability-first message, while complicating the appeal of reformist movements already portrayed by critics as sources of disruption rather than predictability.
Nor does Thailand map neatly onto a binary divide. Beyond reformists and conservatives lies a shifting constellation of pragmatic and regional parties whose voters are motivated less by esoteric and local considerations. Bhumjaithai’s success derives partly from thriving within this fluid middle terrain. It is a fragmentation of a kind seen all over Europe as well.
The deeper problem is legitimacy rather than ideology. Thailand’s crisis has been sustained by the erosion of constitutional trust. Populist governments were marred by corruption controversies and governance failures. Elite interventions repeatedly disrupted electoral continuity. Courts became central political actors. Legitimacy deteriorated because large segments of society doubted that political competition unfolded within neutral rules.
When elections cannot reliably confer authority, politics migrates to courts, streets, and barracks. A new constitution, should one emerge, may only codify a temporary truce between competing fears. And this Thai crisis – this crisis of the spirit, if you will – is the democratic world’s as well: There is too much unhappiness around politics.
One outcome is that very few leaders today are truly popular – even though they did get elected, in some cases repeatedly, like Trump, France’s Emmanuel Macron and Netanyahu.
The enduring challenge lies deeper: persuading minorities that defeat does not equal annihilation, persuading majorities that victory does not license domination. No institutional architecture can substitute for a cohesive society with a culture of legitimacy. Thailand’s latest vote is basically a reminder that we all have a problem.
But at least we also have Dylan — and Walt Whitman.
