Thailand’s current crisis may finally end the cycle of populism and polarization that has crippled its democratic aspirations. But it is also revealing that there are far worse forces undermining Thai democracy.
By Dan Slater
July 2025
Amid the current global cycle of populism and polarization, Thailand was one of the first democracies to begin spiraling downward. The polarizing populist at the center of this democracy-damaging spiral was Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand’s richest man and first-ever massively popular politician. Now, almost 25 years after Thaksin was first elected in 2001, nearly 20 years after his first removal from office in a military coup in 2006, and less than two years since Thaksin’s negotiated return to Bangkok from his 15 years in exile, Thailand may finally be escaping its seemingly endless populism-polarization cycle.
Unfortunately, this escape is tipping Thailand back toward deepened autocracy, not democracy. One can imagine various ways that escaping a populism-polarization cycle might prove democratically fortuitous: An entrenched oligarchy comes to terms with the legitimate grievances that gave populists so much electoral appeal. Populists win power but gradually become invested in protecting democratic institutions instead of attacking them. Conservative forces moderate their worst oligarchic tendencies and become more acceptable to a majority of the electorate. A grand ideological compromise is forged to reconcile the demands of rising populist forces with the core interests of embattled political and economic elites. Through any of these escape routes, the likely destination would be a deepened democracy, not a retrenched autocracy.
Thailand is following none of those paths. Instead, the country has escaped polarization over the past two years through a mutually self-serving powersharing deal between erstwhile ideological opposites. This coalition is now predictably coming unglued, threatening yet again to eliminate any leading role for elected civilian politicians in Thailand’s hybrid authoritarian system of government. Thailand’s era of populism is now poised to end with the outright defeat of populist forces and a return to the autocratic past, rather than a more inclusive democratic future forged from struggles and compromises attending populism’s rise. In its impending post-populist era, Thailand’s only viable road back to democracy appears to be through popular contention — or even another democratic revolution, as occurred back in 1973 and 1992 — against its intractable autocratic elite.
Democracy Cries Uncle
Thailand’s ruling alliance of monarchy and military finally and grudgingly came to terms with Thaksin and his political vehicle, the Pheu Thai Party, after national elections in May 2023. After almost a quarter-century of dominating every election the military has shown the courage to allow, Pheu Thai surprisingly finished second in the 2023 vote, behind the progressive, youth-centered Move Forward party. This substantially weakened version of Pheu Thai was a far more acceptable formateur of a civilian government than its mightier early incarnations to a military and monarchy eternally dead set on keeping all politicians weak — or at least weaker than themselves.
This diminished version of Pheu Thai is proving much easier than its prior incarnations to polish off. As is so often the case with opposition parties, Pheu Thai lost much of its popular appeal when it stopped opposing a ruling authoritarian elite and allowed itself to be coopted into what was fundamentally an antidemocratic powersharing arrangement. More than anything, the fact that Pheu Thai actively chose to lead a coalition composed of military-friendly parties instead of working to build a progressive coalition with Move Forward — and then baldly leveraged the deal to return Thaksin from exile and reduce his criminal charges — discredited the party’s democratic bona fides.
Although Thaksin returned to Thailand weakened, he was evidently not chastened. His youngest daughter Paetongtarn formally assumed the position of prime minister in his place, self-evidently serving from day one as Thaksin’s proxy. The Gordian Knot of Thai politics over the past two decades — namely, that the military-monarchy alliance cannot tolerate ambitious politicians, and Thaksin cannot renounce his ambition to govern Thailand once again as its elected leader — was in no way untied by the coalition agreement. It was never going to take very much to call into question Pheu Thai’s shaky alliance with the party allies of the military and monarchy.
And indeed, the current crisis erupted over not terribly much at all. In the wake of a brief border skirmish with Cambodia over chronically disputed Buddhist temples, Prime Minister Paetongtarn tried to soothe tensions with Cambodian leader Hun Sen in a phone call, which was subsequently leaked. The leaked call exposed Paetongtarn supplicating to Hun Sen, calling him “uncle.” Worse, she came across as criticizing the Thai military for its role in the conflict, even implying that she was more amenable to the Cambodian position on the border conflict than the stance of her own nation’s military.
The fateful phone call dripped with the irony, if not comedy, of Southeast Asia’s dynastic politics and informal patterns of authoritarian rule. Paetongtarn may be a formal head of government while Hun Sen is not, but it is Hun Sen and not Paetongtarn who truly runs a government. In both Thailand and Cambodia, the formal civilian leader — in Cambodia’s case, Hun Sen’s son Hun Samet — actually answers to the father who anointed them. That means real power in Cambodia, where the ruling party indeed rules. It means far less power in Thailand, where Thaksin is but the titular leader of a party that labors under the yoke of military-monarchy domination.
Move Backward
The immediate fallout from the leaked phone call has been Paetongtarn’s suspension as prime minister by Thailand’s pliant judiciary. This has become a familiar pattern in twenty-first-century Thailand, where the courts recurrently do the military and monarchy’s bidding by wiping their civilian rivals off the political map. The same fate befell Paetongtarn’s immediate predecessor as prime minister representing Pheu Thai in April 2024, as well as her aunt Yingluck after her spell as prime minister from 2011 to 2014. An even earlier Thaksin proxy PM was removed back in 2008 for purported corruption related to his hosting of a television cooking show. Pheu Thai itself only exists as a replacement for its predecessor party Thai Rak Thai, which the judiciary banned back in 2007.
The current crisis seems likely to end Thailand’s long polarization-populism cycle because it seems likely to finally polish off Pheu Thai and Thaksin as leading political forces. Opinion polls show Pheu Thai slumping ignominiously down to 11.5 percent in the wake of Paetongtarn’s humiliating phone call. To the extent that Pheu Thai’s political influence and significance have always derived from Thaksin’s massive popularity, and not just his family fortune, this crumbling of popular support could prove irreversibly crippling. There is clear precedent here with Thailand’s most historically institutionalized party, the Democrats, who have faded into insignificance since their connivance with monarchical-military rule after the 2019 elections helped destroy their impressively consistent popularity.
When Thai opposition parties refrain from shooting themselves in the foot by joining antidemocratic governments, as Pheu Thai and the Democrats have recently done, Thai judges pick up the metaphorical gun. The deepest damage the Thai judiciary has recently done to the nation’s democratic aspirations has been to the winners of last year’s elections, the Move Forward party. Having disbanded various earlier iterations of Pheu Thai after it cheekily won elections in landslides, the courts unsurprisingly did the same thing to Move Forward after its shocking upset of Pheu Thai in the 2024 vote. (Indeed, Move Forward itself was the successor party to Future Forward, which was banned in 2020.) Just as unsurprisingly, Move Forward’s new incarnation, the People’s Party, has maintained robust popularity and has apparently benefited most from Pheu Thai’s self-inflicted wounds. This is even as — or perhaps because — its members continue to face unrelenting trumped-up legal challenges.
For the only legitimately popular party in Thailand to be effectively banned is a recipe for system-level instability. The massive youth-led protests that roiled Thailand in 2020 after the initial banning of Future Forward were a warning shot against the nation’s hidebound ruling elite. Once again that elite is responding by battening down the hatches instead of opening things up. At various pivotal moments in the reign of Thailand’s prior king, Bhumibol Adulyadej (r. 1946–2016), the widely beloved monarch burnished his own substantial democratic legitimacy by urging more space for freely elected politicians to help govern his kingdom. The current monarch, wedded more tightly as he is to the military than the Thai population, shows no such inclinations.
Worse than Populism
Several interesting general implications follow. First, it is often remarked that authoritarianism has taken on new stripes. In place of militaries seizing power in coups, elected executives now more often attack judiciaries and other institutions of constraint in their drives for political domination. What’s old and familiar in Thailand is that the military still rules and seizes power as it wills. What’s relatively new is the military and monarchy’s reliance on the judiciary to do its dirty work of eliminating its rivals. When democracies erode, the judiciary is often an early victim; but when autocracies deepen, it is more often an enduring accomplice.
This underscores a broader point about autocratization in our current historical moment. Democratic backsliding is a major source of autocratization to be sure, but just as important is the growing tendency for hybrid authoritarian regimes to experience autocratic deepening. Indeed, this is the dominant autocratization trend in Asia, where the baseline was largely autocratic to begin with. Thailand is not currently experiencing regime closure as coercive and severe as its immediate neighbors, Cambodia and Burma. Nor has Thailand returned all the way to its bouts of pure military rule that followed the coups of 2006 and 2014. But that is the direction Thailand is presently heading under its current leadership.
Finally, Thailand also serves as a timely reminder that while polarization and populism are indeed major threats to democracy worldwide — including in what until recently were uniformly considered the world’s largest democracies, India and the United States — they are not the only threats. In some places, these forces bring glimmers of light to otherwise closed, sclerotic authoritarian orders. The bridling of polarization and the crippling of populists can serve to snuff out that dim democratic glow in otherwise darkened political realms. The big question is not just whether harmful populism-polarization cycles can be escaped, but how — and whether in a more democratic or autocratic direction.
Dan Slater is the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan.
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Peerapon Boonyakiat/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
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