ASEAN Beat | Politics | Southeast Asia

Bangkok’s Voters Hand Chadchart Second Term as Governor By Decisive Margin

Chadchart Sittipunt, an independent, has replicated the landslide victory that delivered him to the governor’s office in 2022.

A Bangkok resident casts a vote in the city’s gubernatorial election on Jun. 28, 2026.

Chadchart Sittipunt, the governor of Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, has won re-election after the city’s residents overwhelmingly backed him for a second term in an election yesterday.

According to vote counts reported by Thai PBS, Chadchart won 1.44 million votes or 68 percent of the vote, with 95 percent of the votes counted. This put him well ahead of his main rivals, independent Mallika Boonmeetrakul Mahasuk (288,000 votes, or 13 percent of the total), Chaiwat Sathawornwichit of the People’s Party (177,000 votes), and Democrat candidate Anucha Burapachaisri (102,000 votes).

As the Bangkok Post reported, Chadchart’s total set a new record for a winning Bangkok governor candidate, surpassing his own record of 1.39 million votes, set during his  initial election in 2022. Just short of half of the 4.4 million eligible voters turned out to cast a ballot yesterday.

Chadchart, an engineer and former transport minister in the Pheu Thai party-led government that was ousted by a military coup in 2014, will now return to the governorship for another four years, pending official confirmation by the Election Commission.

Following his victory, the 60-year-old said that it was time to “work, work, work.”

“The goal of work in the next four years is not the publication of achievements but success in proving to people that their lives will be noticeably better,” he said, as per the Bangkok Post.

Bangkok – a far-flung megacity of between 5 and 11 million people, depending on how you count it – is the only province in Thailand where the governor is elected rather than appointed by the Ministry of Interior. This arrangement has been in place since 1975, when the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) was formed and the rapidly expanding city became a special administrative entity run by an elected governor with a four-year term.

Chadchart’s re-election was widely predicted; indeed, its seeming inevitability may explain the relatively low voter turnout.

Past governors have often been blamed for Bangkok’s various problems, which include traffic, flooding, and the worsening smog problem, and Chadchart’s ability to maintain his high levels of popularity, especially given the BMA’s limited powers, is no small achievement.

One public opinion poll conducted last year found that 48 percent of respondents planned to vote for Chadchart again at the next gubernatorial election. A further 74 percent of respondents........

© The Diplomat