Interviews | Politics | Southeast Asia

Napon Jatusripitak on Thailand’s ‘Blue Wave’ Election

“If this was a conservative triumph, it was one built not on ideology but on the disciplined mobilization of patronage networks that had been consolidating for years.”

Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul attends a Bhumjaithai party rally in Nakhon Si Thammarat, Thailand, Feb. 5, 2026.

On February 8, the people of Thailand went to the polls for a snap general election. In a result that surprised many observers, the conservative, military-friendly Bhumjaithai party won a decisive victory. According to preliminary vote counts, it clinched around 193 of 500 seats in the House of Representatives, and is set to form a new government under Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul in the coming weeks.

The result was disappointing for Pheu Thai, which saw its share of House seats drop to 78 from 141 in 2023, and particularly so for the People’s Party, whose predecessor, the Move Forward Party, came in first that year with 151 seats. This year, the People’s Party won just 118 seats as its hoped-for “orange wave” failed to materialize.

What factors accounted for the election’s outcome? Napon Jatusripitak, a political scientist and coordinator of the Thailand Studies Programme at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, has examined the preliminary electoral data in depth. He spoke with The Diplomat’s Southeast Asia Editor Sebastian Strangio about what the results really show, what role the Thailand-Cambodia border conflict played in the outcome, and whether the polls were really an outlier.

Bhumjaithai defied many predictions, and most pre-election polls, by winning a decisive victory. What do you think were the biggest factors in the conservative resurgence? To what extent was nationalism a significant factor to the final result, or was it more a case of regional powerbroking?

Bhumjaithai’s victory has been widely framed as a triumph for Thai conservatism. Yet the scale of that victory cannot be explained on ideological grounds alone. The so-called “conservative resurgence” was driven less by a rightward shift among the electorate than by the systematic mobilization of patronage networks on a large scale. Bhumjaithai was uniquely positioned to do this with a degree of coordination that would have been difficult to achieve had it not controlled the Ministry of Interior and secured the defection of major provincial dynasties (baan yai) in the months before the election.

This is not to say that nationalism was irrelevant. It created a campaigning environment favorable to Bhumjaithai in at least two ways.

First, the surge in nationalist sentiment surrounding the Thailand-Cambodia border conflict decisively shifted public attention away from the Bhumjaithai-led minority government’s mishandling of the Southern floods in late 2025, dampening criticism and shielding the administration from scrutiny at a moment when it could least afford it. This proved fortuitous for Anutin Charnvirakul, Bhumjaithai’s leader and prime ministerial candidate, who had been working to give the Thai public a preview of what his premiership would look like. In a bid to project an image of technocratic governance, Anutin had appointed a slate of high-profile technocrats to his cabinet, including Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow, Commerce Minister Suphajee Suthumpun, and Finance Minister Ekniti Nitithanprapas. That image would have been difficult to sustain had the flood response remained the dominant story heading into the election.

Second, the nationalist climate left Bhumjaithai as the only major party able to credibly position itself as a reliable partner to the military. Pheu Thai had been tainted by a leaked conversation in which then-Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra referred to the commander of the Second Army Region as being “on the opposite side” in a call with Cambodia’s Hun Sen in June 2025, leaving the party looking not merely unreliable on matters of national security, but compromised.

The People’s Party, meanwhile, was seen as unpatriotic considering its earlier pledges to reform the military, cut the defense budget, and abolish conscription. The reformist platform that had propelled the People’s Party’s predecessor, Move Forward, to success in 2023 was now a political liability.

As a testament to Bhumjaithai’s adept technocratic-nationalist-conservative positioning in this landscape, the party surged more than sixfold in party list vote share, from roughly 3 percent in 2023 to 19 percent in 2026, based on preliminary results. For the first time in its history, the party has a strong claim to national appeal, thanks in no small part to the fact that conservative votes previously scattered across multiple parties – including United Thai Nation, the party of former junta leader Gen. Prayut Chan-o-cha – have now coalesced around Bhumjaithai, a consolidation that may have been accelerated by the last-minute royal audience granted to Anutin on the night before the election.

On closer look, however, outside Bangkok – where Bhumjaithai came second in the party list – a non-trivial share of these party-list votes came from provinces dominated by the party’s baan yai: some situated in border provinces where nationalist sentiment might be expected to run high, but others nowhere near, such as Buriram, Chon Buri, Surin, Sisaket, Suphanburi, and Phetchabun. This raises the question of how much of this support was ideologically driven and how much was simply mobilized through the electoral machinery of provincial dynasties now operating under the party’s umbrella.

Even if we treat party-list performance as a reliable proxy for Bhumjaithai’s ideological appeal or Anutin’s personal popularity, the party still trailed the People’s Party in the party-list vote by nearly 4 million votes – equivalent to roughly 12 party-list seats. This suggests a party that is significantly more popular than before, whether owing to nationalism, the technocrat appointments, or both, but not popular enough to warrant the conclusion that Thai society has undergone a wholesale conservative realignment.

Indeed, as Prajak Kongkirati and I note in a recent piece in Fulcrum, Bhumjaithai is the first party in Thai history to win a general election without having won the party-list vote since the two-ballot system was introduced. This discrepancy tells us that Bhumjaithai’s victory was built less on popular appeal than on ground-level organization, supported by the use of local state machinery that, in most elections, proves to be the decisive variable in mobilizing huakhanaen (vote-canvassing) networks effectively.

In the constituency vote, which tends to reflect candidate-centered strategies and local considerations, Bhumjaithai outpaced the People’s Party by roughly 2 million votes. Yet under Thailand’s first-past-the-post system, that moderate margin produced a disproportionate outcome: an 87-seat advantage in constituency contests, leaving Bhumjaithai with roughly twice as many seats. One might reasonably argue that party popularity was the driver of these wins – but the data suggest otherwise. In every one of the 174 constituencies Bhumjaithai won, the candidate outperformed the party: winning candidates averaged 53.31 percent of the constituency vote against a party-list average of just 25.65 percent in those same constituencies. In most of these constituencies, another party topped the party-list vote. Where the reverse was true – where the party was more popular than the candidate, as in metropolitan Bangkok – that popularity did not translate into constituency seats.

Bhumjaithai’s dominance in constituency races is thus a better reflection of the strength of its candidates, many of them drawn from baan yai families who commanded entrenched patronage networks at the district, subdistrict, and village levels. After Anutin became prime minister under the short-lived Memorandum of Agreement with the People’s Party, Bhumjaithai positioned itself as the natural home for many baan yai who sought a party vehicle that could best guarantee access to government. Most were fleeing the implosion of formerly military-backed parties such as Palang Pracharath and United Thai Nation, though some were peeled away from Pheu Thai.

Breaking with past patterns, when party switchers were typically punished at the polls, 44 of the 61 incumbent MPs who defected to Bhumjaithai went on to retain their seats. They included some of Thailand’s most established provincial dynasties, such as Santi Promphat’s faction in Phetchabun and the Silpa-archa family in Suphanburi. Others were formerly competing networks – most notably Suchart Chomklin’s and Sontaya Khunpluem’s rival factions in Chon Buri – that chose to consolidate under Bhumjaithai rather than fragment the vote and create an opening for the “orange camp,” as they had in 2023.

It is also important to note that, in light of widespread electoral irregularities, election commissioners in all 400 constituencies were drawn from a pool of district chiefs. Given Anutin’s sweeping transfers and appointments targeting provincial governors, deputy governors, and district chiefs in the months leading up to the election, it would not be surprising if these moves were designed not only to facilitate the mobilization of vote-canvassing networks but also to tilt the electoral playing field in Bhumjaithai’s favor, in a manner reminiscent of Palang Pracharat in the 2019 general election.

If this was a conservative triumph, it was one built not on ideology but on the disciplined mobilization of patronage networks that had been consolidating for years, with the quiet backing of Thailand’s conservative establishment that had to select a new party vehicle to safeguard its interests.

In terms of regional voting patterns, was there anything that surprised you?

In terms of party-list vote share, Bhumjaithai did not place first in any region. This was surprising considering that the party won the election. I think that says more about the party than about the Thai electorate.

To what extent did results in the 400 constituency seats diverge from the results for the 100 party-list seats, and what do you think this says about the election?

I addressed this question to some extent in the first question, but one additional point deserves emphasis. When one compares constituency winners with the top party-list vote-getters on an electoral map, this looks like two entirely different elections. In the constituency tier, there is a pronounced urban-rural divide: Bhumjaithai, Pheu Thai, and Klatham performed well in rural constituencies, while support for the People’s Party was concentrated in urban centers. I confirmed this pattern using night-time light data from satellite imagery as a proxy for urbanization.

The party-list tier, by contrast, displays clearer regional clusters. The People’s Party dominated Bangkok, the North, and the East, and competed with Bhumjaithai in Central Thailand. In the Northeast, competition was primarily between Bhumjaithai and Pheu Thai, while in the South the Democrats succeeded in staging a comeback.

At the constituency level (see Figure 1), Bhumjaithai won 58 constituencies in which the People’s Party topped the party-list vote, while Klatham won 34 such constituencies.

Figure 1. A heatmap comparing constituency winner and top party-list vote-getter. (Source: Author’s creation based on preliminary results obtained from the Election Commission of Thailand)

These patterns underscore the extent to which Thai voters differentiate between their constituency and party-list ballots. I expected there to be more convergence this time around compared to 2023, but this does not seem to be the case. So long as the constituency ballot lists nothing but candidates’ numbers – numbers that can differ from those assigned to their parties on the party-list ballot – the two tiers effectively function as separate arenas of competition. Outside of campaign messaging, voters receive no cue to connect the candidate they select in their constituency with the party they support nationally – a design that bestows advantages on parties that depend less on partisan appeal than on the mobilizational power of individual candidates.

On the issue of the People’s Party’s disappointing return, how much of this was a case of underperformance this year versus Move Forward’s overperformance in 2023? How did the context of the 2023 election differ from that of 2026?

I think 2023 was an anomaly, and Thailand is now returning to an equilibrium in which patronage politics trumps ideology and social movements. That election was held after nearly nine years under the same leader, Prayut Chan-o-cha, and in the aftermath of an unprecedented youth-led pro-democracy movement that had called for reform of the royal-military power nexus. As a result, it functioned less like a conventional election than a referendum on the conservative status quo. Move Forward positioned itself as the clearest vehicle for a rejection vote against Prayut and everything he represented, and many voters, urban and rural alike, saw both their constituency and party-list ballots as an opportunity to determine the country’s future direction – whether to dismantle the institutional legacy of two military coups or to preserve the conservative status quo those coups had entrenched.

2026 was a very different kind of election. It took place against the backdrop of multiple overlapping issues: the Thailand-Cambodia border conflict, economic stagnation, and growing concerns over the influence of gray capital linked to regional scam operations. No single campaign narrative dominated. Worse, most parties were hesitant to draw clear lines, having entered into a series of elite compromises that sat uneasily with their supporters’ expectations.

Many voters likely went to the polls without a clear sense of how their ballots would translate into a government – aware that the parties they voted for could very well end up in coalition with the parties they had tried to vote against. It was, in short, a crisis of representation. In that atmosphere, ideological conviction counted for less than it had in 2023. This likely contributed to lower-than-usual voter turnout, even after accounting for electoral irregularities, and made it easier for candidates to localize their campaigns, framing the contest around everyday concerns rather than national ideological stakes – particularly in rural constituencies where personal ties and patronage networks continue to play a dominant role.

For the People’s Party, this was detrimental to its constituency performance. As the previous election established, there is a strong positive correlation between the party’s party-list vote share and its candidates’ performance in constituency races. The relationship is not strictly causal, but the pattern is clear: People’s Party candidates tend to win where the party itself is popular. That may sound like stating the obvious – but in Thailand, the People’s Party is the only major party for which this holds true. A comparison of the 2023 and 2026 general elections reveals that the popularity-to-win ratio is roughly the same for both Move Forward and the People’s Party.

Specifically, constituency victories become significantly more likely when party-list vote share exceeds around 40 percent. The problem is that, in 2026, far fewer constituencies fell into that range than in 2023. The People’s Party, in short, was popular enough to lead the party-list vote, but not popular enough in enough places to convert that support into seats.

It also failed to retain 34 of the 112 seats that Move Forward had won in 2023: 20 went to Bhumjaithai, 10 to Klatham, three to Pheu Thai, and one to the Democrats. On the constituency ballot, the party’s support contracted to urban strongholds – most notably Bangkok, where it swept every seat. This pattern underscores a broader point: outside the exceptional circumstances of 2023, the People’s Party’s ideological appeal alone was not enough to overcome the influence of dynastic electoral machines and their patronage networks in rural constituencies.

One side-plot that has received less international media attention is Pheu Thai’s relatively poor performance, which saw it slip to third and shed 67 seats in the House of Representatives. What do you think explains it?

I think Pheu Thai found itself caught between two losing battles. In rural constituencies, it struggled to compete against Klatham in the ground war – the money-driven contest to win over local leaders who mobilize votes on behalf of candidates. In urban constituencies, it could not match the People’s Party’s performance in the so-called air war, fought through krasae (loosely translated as national political currents). There was little krasae left to harness after Pheu Thai entered into a coalition with military-backed and conservative parties in 2023 against the wishes of many of its supporters, failed to deliver its flagship policy in full and on time, and then saw its standing erode further after the deeply compromising phone conversation between Paetongtarn and Hun Sen came to light.

The party had very little to offer beyond nostalgia: a renewed pledge to extend the 30-baht healthcare scheme, a new lottery scheme that failed to be taken seriously, and the positioning of its prime ministerial candidate, Yodchanan Wongsawat, as a northerner with family ties to Thaksin – though whether that association proved more liability than asset may be written in the results. Yodchanan was a natural campaigner – far more comfortable mingling with crowds than Srettha Thavisin had been in 2023 – but the party was in too sorry a state for his efforts to make a meaningful difference.

Bhumjaithai’s win was arguably the first decisive conservative victory since 1996. What chance is there that it can end the endemic instability that has marked the past two decades of Thailand’s politics?

The central problem in Thai politics over the past two decades has been the lopsided balance of power between elected governments and unelected actors who retain significant influence over the security and judicial apparatuses, as well as a range of so-called “referee” bodies capable of constraining or removing elected governments. When a popularly elected government has posed a challenge to conservative interests, unelected actors have repeatedly intervened – either by pulling the plug on democracy outright, or by deploying judicial instruments such as party dissolution and ethics rulings, the latter of which were used to dismiss both Srettha Thavisin and Paetongtarn Shinawatra from the premiership. This is the structural source of Thailand’s political instability – one that, paradoxically, has kept conservative elites firmly in power and elected forces in check despite the turbulence it generates.

Does Bhumjaithai’s victory change the equation? Yes and no. On the one hand, it may reduce the need for conservative elites to resort to extra-parliamentary intervention – for the simple reason that they no longer need to. This is a government that appears to have been endorsed by the conservative establishment well before the election took place, and it is therefore unlikely to threaten the interests that have historically precipitated military or judicial intervention.

On the other hand, there is no guarantee that this unequal power-sharing arrangement will endure. Should Anutin prove unable to manage competing interests within his coalition or to satisfy key establishment actors, Bhumjaithai could be discarded as the preferred vehicle of rule (in ways similar to how Pheu Thai was cast aside after the threat posed by Move Forward had been dealt with).

More broadly, if legal instruments are now weaponized primarily against the opposition rather than those in government, this too could generate another political or social upheaval on a scale comparable to the backlash that followed Future Forward’s dissolution. Nevertheless, there are clear signs of fatigue and disillusionment at present, and little indication that another mass movement capable of unsettling the conservative status quo is imminent. Much of the backlash has been directed at the Election Commission for mismanagement of the election, rather than at the broader power structure and institutional arrangements behind it.

It is worth recalling that Prayut Chan-o-cha ruled for nearly nine years – five of them under outright military rule, during which his government enjoyed near-absolute power – and even that was not enough to put an end to instability. Bhumjaithai may have won the 2026 general election with a decisive margin, which sets it apart from previous military-backed parties, but widespread allegations of electoral irregularities have done little to strengthen its claim to legitimacy – and a government that cannot credibly claim a clean mandate is not off to a promising start in my view.

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On February 8, the people of Thailand went to the polls for a snap general election. In a result that surprised many observers, the conservative, military-friendly Bhumjaithai party won a decisive victory. According to preliminary vote counts, it clinched around 193 of 500 seats in the House of Representatives, and is set to form a new government under Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul in the coming weeks.

The result was disappointing for Pheu Thai, which saw its share of House seats drop to 78 from 141 in 2023, and particularly so for the People’s Party, whose predecessor, the Move Forward Party, came in first that year with 151 seats. This year, the People’s Party won just 118 seats as its hoped-for “orange wave” failed to materialize.

What factors accounted for the election’s outcome? Napon Jatusripitak, a political scientist and coordinator of the Thailand Studies Programme at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, has examined the preliminary electoral data in depth. He spoke with The Diplomat’s Southeast Asia Editor Sebastian Strangio about what the results really show, what role the Thailand-Cambodia border conflict played in the outcome, and whether the polls were really an outlier.

Bhumjaithai defied many predictions, and most pre-election polls, by winning a decisive victory. What do you think were the biggest factors in the conservative resurgence? To what extent was nationalism a significant factor to the final result, or was it more a case of regional powerbroking?

Bhumjaithai’s victory has been widely framed as a triumph for Thai conservatism. Yet the scale of that victory cannot be explained on ideological grounds alone. The so-called “conservative resurgence” was driven less by a rightward shift among the electorate than by the systematic mobilization of patronage networks on a large scale. Bhumjaithai was uniquely positioned to do this with a degree of coordination that would have been difficult to achieve had it not controlled the Ministry of Interior and secured the defection of major provincial dynasties (baan yai) in the months before the election.

This is not to say that nationalism was irrelevant. It created a campaigning environment favorable to Bhumjaithai in at least two ways.

First, the surge in nationalist sentiment surrounding the Thailand-Cambodia border conflict decisively shifted public attention away from the Bhumjaithai-led minority government’s mishandling of the Southern floods in late 2025, dampening criticism and shielding the administration from scrutiny at a moment when it could least afford it. This proved fortuitous for Anutin Charnvirakul, Bhumjaithai’s leader and prime ministerial candidate, who had been working to give the Thai public a preview of what his premiership would look like. In a bid to project an image of technocratic governance, Anutin had appointed a slate of high-profile technocrats to his cabinet, including Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow, Commerce Minister Suphajee Suthumpun, and Finance Minister Ekniti Nitithanprapas. That image would have been difficult to sustain had the flood response remained the dominant story heading into the election.

Second, the nationalist climate left Bhumjaithai as the only major party able to credibly position itself as a reliable partner to the military. Pheu Thai had been tainted by a leaked conversation in which then-Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra referred to the commander of the Second Army Region as being “on the opposite side” in a call with Cambodia’s Hun Sen in June 2025, leaving the party looking not merely unreliable on matters of national security, but compromised.

The People’s Party, meanwhile, was seen as unpatriotic considering its earlier pledges to reform the military, cut the defense budget, and abolish conscription. The reformist platform that had propelled the People’s Party’s predecessor, Move Forward, to success in 2023 was now a political liability.

As a testament to Bhumjaithai’s adept technocratic-nationalist-conservative positioning in this landscape, the party surged more than sixfold in party list vote share, from roughly 3 percent in 2023 to 19 percent in 2026, based on preliminary results. For the first time in its history, the party has a strong claim to national appeal, thanks in no small part to the fact that conservative votes previously scattered across multiple parties – including United Thai Nation, the party of former junta leader Gen. Prayut Chan-o-cha – have now coalesced around Bhumjaithai, a consolidation that may have been accelerated by the last-minute royal audience granted to Anutin on the night before the election.

On closer look, however, outside Bangkok – where Bhumjaithai came second in the party list – a non-trivial share of these party-list votes came from provinces dominated by the party’s baan yai: some situated in border provinces where nationalist sentiment might be expected to run high, but others nowhere near, such as Buriram, Chon Buri, Surin, Sisaket, Suphanburi, and Phetchabun. This raises the question of how much of this support was ideologically driven and how much was simply mobilized through the electoral machinery of provincial dynasties now operating under the party’s umbrella.

Even if we treat party-list performance as a reliable proxy for Bhumjaithai’s ideological appeal or Anutin’s personal popularity, the party still trailed the People’s Party in the party-list vote by nearly 4 million votes – equivalent to roughly 12 party-list seats. This suggests a party that is significantly more popular than before, whether owing to nationalism, the technocrat appointments, or both, but not popular enough to warrant the conclusion that Thai society has undergone a wholesale conservative realignment.

Indeed, as Prajak Kongkirati and I note in a recent piece in Fulcrum, Bhumjaithai is the first party in Thai history to win a general election without having won the party-list vote since the two-ballot system was introduced. This discrepancy tells us that Bhumjaithai’s victory was built less on popular appeal than on ground-level organization, supported by the use of local state machinery that, in most elections, proves to be the decisive variable in mobilizing huakhanaen (vote-canvassing) networks effectively.

In the constituency vote, which tends to reflect candidate-centered strategies and local considerations, Bhumjaithai outpaced the People’s Party by roughly 2 million votes. Yet under Thailand’s first-past-the-post system, that moderate margin produced a disproportionate outcome: an 87-seat advantage in constituency contests, leaving Bhumjaithai with roughly twice as many seats. One might reasonably argue that party popularity was the driver of these wins – but the data suggest otherwise. In every one of the 174 constituencies Bhumjaithai won, the candidate outperformed the party: winning candidates averaged 53.31 percent of the constituency vote against a party-list average of just 25.65 percent in those same constituencies. In most of these constituencies, another party topped the party-list vote. Where the reverse was true – where the party was more popular than the candidate, as in metropolitan Bangkok – that popularity did not translate into constituency seats.

Bhumjaithai’s dominance in constituency races is thus a better reflection of the strength of its candidates, many of them drawn from baan yai families who commanded entrenched patronage networks at the district, subdistrict, and village levels. After Anutin became prime minister under the short-lived Memorandum of Agreement with the People’s Party, Bhumjaithai positioned itself as the natural home for many baan yai who sought a party vehicle that could best guarantee access to government. Most were fleeing the implosion of formerly military-backed parties such as Palang Pracharath and United Thai Nation, though some were peeled away from Pheu Thai.

Breaking with past patterns, when party switchers were typically punished at the polls, 44 of the 61 incumbent MPs who defected to Bhumjaithai went on to retain their seats. They included some of Thailand’s most established provincial dynasties, such as Santi Promphat’s faction in Phetchabun and the Silpa-archa family in Suphanburi. Others were formerly competing networks – most notably Suchart Chomklin’s and Sontaya Khunpluem’s rival factions in Chon Buri – that chose to consolidate under Bhumjaithai rather than fragment the vote and create an opening for the “orange camp,” as they had in 2023.

It is also important to note that, in light of widespread electoral irregularities, election commissioners in all 400 constituencies were drawn from a pool of district chiefs. Given Anutin’s sweeping transfers and appointments targeting provincial governors, deputy governors, and district chiefs in the months leading up to the election, it would not be surprising if these moves were designed not only to facilitate the mobilization of vote-canvassing networks but also to tilt the electoral playing field in Bhumjaithai’s favor, in a manner reminiscent of Palang Pracharat in the 2019 general election.

If this was a conservative triumph, it was one built not on ideology but on the disciplined mobilization of patronage networks that had been consolidating for years, with the quiet backing of Thailand’s conservative establishment that had to select a new party vehicle to safeguard its interests.

In terms of regional voting patterns, was there anything that surprised you?

In terms of party-list vote share, Bhumjaithai did not place first in any region. This was surprising considering that the party won the election. I think that says more about the party than about the Thai electorate.

To what extent did results in the 400 constituency seats diverge from the results for the 100 party-list seats, and what do you think this says about the election?

I addressed this question to some extent in the first question, but one additional point deserves emphasis. When one compares constituency winners with the top party-list vote-getters on an electoral map, this looks like two entirely different elections. In the constituency tier, there is a pronounced urban-rural divide: Bhumjaithai, Pheu Thai, and Klatham performed well in rural constituencies, while support for the People’s Party was concentrated in urban centers. I confirmed this pattern using night-time light data from satellite imagery as a proxy for urbanization.

The party-list tier, by contrast, displays clearer regional clusters. The People’s Party dominated Bangkok, the North, and the East, and competed with Bhumjaithai in Central Thailand. In the Northeast, competition was primarily between Bhumjaithai and Pheu Thai, while in the South the Democrats succeeded in staging a comeback.

At the constituency level (see Figure 1), Bhumjaithai won 58 constituencies in which the People’s Party topped the party-list vote, while Klatham won 34 such constituencies.

Figure 1. A heatmap comparing constituency winner and top party-list vote-getter. (Source: Author’s creation based on preliminary results obtained from the Election Commission of Thailand)

These patterns underscore the extent to which Thai voters differentiate between their constituency and party-list ballots. I expected there to be more convergence this time around compared to 2023, but this does not seem to be the case. So long as the constituency ballot lists nothing but candidates’ numbers – numbers that can differ from those assigned to their parties on the party-list ballot – the two tiers effectively function as separate arenas of competition. Outside of campaign messaging, voters receive no cue to connect the candidate they select in their constituency with the party they support nationally – a design that bestows advantages on parties that depend less on partisan appeal than on the mobilizational power of individual candidates.

On the issue of the People’s Party’s disappointing return, how much of this was a case of underperformance this year versus Move Forward’s overperformance in 2023? How did the context of the 2023 election differ from that of 2026?

I think 2023 was an anomaly, and Thailand is now returning to an equilibrium in which patronage politics trumps ideology and social movements. That election was held after nearly nine years under the same leader, Prayut Chan-o-cha, and in the aftermath of an unprecedented youth-led pro-democracy movement that had called for reform of the royal-military power nexus. As a result, it functioned less like a conventional election than a referendum on the conservative status quo. Move Forward positioned itself as the clearest vehicle for a rejection vote against Prayut and everything he represented, and many voters, urban and rural alike, saw both their constituency and party-list ballots as an opportunity to determine the country’s future direction – whether to dismantle the institutional legacy of two military coups or to preserve the conservative status quo those coups had entrenched.

2026 was a very different kind of election. It took place against the backdrop of multiple overlapping issues: the Thailand-Cambodia border conflict, economic stagnation, and growing concerns over the influence of gray capital linked to regional scam operations. No single campaign narrative dominated. Worse, most parties were hesitant to draw clear lines, having entered into a series of elite compromises that sat uneasily with their supporters’ expectations.

Many voters likely went to the polls without a clear sense of how their ballots would translate into a government – aware that the parties they voted for could very well end up in coalition with the parties they had tried to vote against. It was, in short, a crisis of representation. In that atmosphere, ideological conviction counted for less than it had in 2023. This likely contributed to lower-than-usual voter turnout, even after accounting for electoral irregularities, and made it easier for candidates to localize their campaigns, framing the contest around everyday concerns rather than national ideological stakes – particularly in rural constituencies where personal ties and patronage networks continue to play a dominant role.

For the People’s Party, this was detrimental to its constituency performance. As the previous election established, there is a strong positive correlation between the party’s party-list vote share and its candidates’ performance in constituency races. The relationship is not strictly causal, but the pattern is clear: People’s Party candidates tend to win where the party itself is popular. That may sound like stating the obvious – but in Thailand, the People’s Party is the only major party for which this holds true. A comparison of the 2023 and 2026 general elections reveals that the popularity-to-win ratio is roughly the same for both Move Forward and the People’s Party.

Specifically, constituency victories become significantly more likely when party-list vote share exceeds around 40 percent. The problem is that, in 2026, far fewer constituencies fell into that range than in 2023. The People’s Party, in short, was popular enough to lead the party-list vote, but not popular enough in enough places to convert that support into seats.

It also failed to retain 34 of the 112 seats that Move Forward had won in 2023: 20 went to Bhumjaithai, 10 to Klatham, three to Pheu Thai, and one to the Democrats. On the constituency ballot, the party’s support contracted to urban strongholds – most notably Bangkok, where it swept every seat. This pattern underscores a broader point: outside the exceptional circumstances of 2023, the People’s Party’s ideological appeal alone was not enough to overcome the influence of dynastic electoral machines and their patronage networks in rural constituencies.

One side-plot that has received less international media attention is Pheu Thai’s relatively poor performance, which saw it slip to third and shed 67 seats in the House of Representatives. What do you think explains it?

I think Pheu Thai found itself caught between two losing battles. In rural constituencies, it struggled to compete against Klatham in the ground war – the money-driven contest to win over local leaders who mobilize votes on behalf of candidates. In urban constituencies, it could not match the People’s Party’s performance in the so-called air war, fought through krasae (loosely translated as national political currents). There was little krasae left to harness after Pheu Thai entered into a coalition with military-backed and conservative parties in 2023 against the wishes of many of its supporters, failed to deliver its flagship policy in full and on time, and then saw its standing erode further after the deeply compromising phone conversation between Paetongtarn and Hun Sen came to light.

The party had very little to offer beyond nostalgia: a renewed pledge to extend the 30-baht healthcare scheme, a new lottery scheme that failed to be taken seriously, and the positioning of its prime ministerial candidate, Yodchanan Wongsawat, as a northerner with family ties to Thaksin – though whether that association proved more liability than asset may be written in the results. Yodchanan was a natural campaigner – far more comfortable mingling with crowds than Srettha Thavisin had been in 2023 – but the party was in too sorry a state for his efforts to make a meaningful difference.

Bhumjaithai’s win was arguably the first decisive conservative victory since 1996. What chance is there that it can end the endemic instability that has marked the past two decades of Thailand’s politics?

The central problem in Thai politics over the past two decades has been the lopsided balance of power between elected governments and unelected actors who retain significant influence over the security and judicial apparatuses, as well as a range of so-called “referee” bodies capable of constraining or removing elected governments. When a popularly elected government has posed a challenge to conservative interests, unelected actors have repeatedly intervened – either by pulling the plug on democracy outright, or by deploying judicial instruments such as party dissolution and ethics rulings, the latter of which were used to dismiss both Srettha Thavisin and Paetongtarn Shinawatra from the premiership. This is the structural source of Thailand’s political instability – one that, paradoxically, has kept conservative elites firmly in power and elected forces in check despite the turbulence it generates.

Does Bhumjaithai’s victory change the equation? Yes and no. On the one hand, it may reduce the need for conservative elites to resort to extra-parliamentary intervention – for the simple reason that they no longer need to. This is a government that appears to have been endorsed by the conservative establishment well before the election took place, and it is therefore unlikely to threaten the interests that have historically precipitated military or judicial intervention.

On the other hand, there is no guarantee that this unequal power-sharing arrangement will endure. Should Anutin prove unable to manage competing interests within his coalition or to satisfy key establishment actors, Bhumjaithai could be discarded as the preferred vehicle of rule (in ways similar to how Pheu Thai was cast aside after the threat posed by Move Forward had been dealt with).

More broadly, if legal instruments are now weaponized primarily against the opposition rather than those in government, this too could generate another political or social upheaval on a scale comparable to the backlash that followed Future Forward’s dissolution. Nevertheless, there are clear signs of fatigue and disillusionment at present, and little indication that another mass movement capable of unsettling the conservative status quo is imminent. Much of the backlash has been directed at the Election Commission for mismanagement of the election, rather than at the broader power structure and institutional arrangements behind it.

It is worth recalling that Prayut Chan-o-cha ruled for nearly nine years – five of them under outright military rule, during which his government enjoyed near-absolute power – and even that was not enough to put an end to instability. Bhumjaithai may have won the 2026 general election with a decisive margin, which sets it apart from previous military-backed parties, but widespread allegations of electoral irregularities have done little to strengthen its claim to legitimacy – and a government that cannot credibly claim a clean mandate is not off to a promising start in my view.

Sebastian Strangio is Southeast Asia editor at The Diplomat. 

People's Party (Thailand)

Thailand 2026 election

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