New star Pita seeks to seize the moment as voters rebuke Thailand’s military rulers

BANGKOK, Thailand — With the electoral winds at his back, Pita Limjaroenrat is deliberately entering a political minefield, littered with parties and governments that dared to disrupt the status quo.

Fresh from his surprise success in Sunday’s national vote, Mr. Pita now hopes to ride strong support from younger people to become Thailand’s youngest prime minister, after an election that delivered a vivid rejection by a large swath of Thai society of nearly a decade of military-dominated government.

Mr. Pita, 42, and his upstart Move Forward Party hope to form a coalition government uniting smaller parties, while litigious knives sharpen around him. The MFP won a plurality of 151 seats in the 500-seat House of Representatives, putting him in the driver’s seat with the Pheu Thai party of pre-race favorite Paetongtarn Shinawatra — which won 141 — in the jockeying over a new government.

Projecting robust defiance, Mr. Pita said Monday it would be “quite far-fetched” for anyone to oppose his victory. He said he was already in talks with five fellow parties to secure a clear majority in the House.

“With the consensus that came out of the election, it will be quite a hefty price to pay for someone who is thinking of abolishing the election results, or forming a minority government,” Mr. Pita said at a celebratory reception. “The sentiment of the era has changed. …I would like to announce here that the Move Forward Party is ready to lead the forming of the future government.”

The electoral system presents its own hurdles: Under a new constitution pushed through by Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, a former army chief who took power in 2014, the 250 government-appointed member of the Senate will join with the House to jointly elect the next government in July.

But previous opposition politicians tried to do what Mr. Pita plans, and they ended up “dissolved and banned” by the Constitution Court for financial conflicts, or allowed to become prime minister but later toppled in a military coup.

Educated at Harvard and MIT, Mr. Pita’s U.S. experience may make it easier for Washington to engage with Bangkok. Mr. Pita’s political base of enthusiastic, energetic young people expanded when they convinced older relatives to vote for the MFP.

His apparent openness to modernizing society is likely to mean he will try to sidestep the intense competition between Beijing and Washington for influence in this strategic Southeast Asian country.

“For the U.S. and China rivalry, Pita said foreign policies are more like a la carte choices, rather than a buffet, emphasizing that it is not necessary to always take sides,” the Thai Enquirer wrote of the election result Monday.

A thankful Mr. Pita and thousands of his cheering supporters thronged Bangkok’s streets on Monday circling Democracy Monument, a site often used for pro-democracy and anti-coup protests.

Mr. Pita presents himself as the opposite of the grim, authoritarian military leaders who seized power in coups in 2006 and 2014, embroiling this Buddhist-majority nation in street clashes, insurrections and other disruptions. His father was an Agriculture Ministry adviser, and his uncle was an assistant to former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in the 2006 military coup.

After a childhood partially in New Zealand, Mr. Pita graduated from Harvard University with a master’s in public policy, and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an MBA. He put those ideas into practice at his late father’s rice bran oil company and other businesses, before divorcing his actress-model wife and plunging into politics.

When the first liberal party he joined dissolved, Mr. Pita, by then a member of Parliament, established the MFP in 2020 with much wider appeal.

If he becomes prime minister, Mr. Pita says he wants to distribute political and financial power and assistance to communities throughout the country, instead of centralizing power in the pampered capital, Bangkok. He plans to challenge Thailand’s large, family-run monopolistic corporations to allow for greater diversification for smaller marketers.

In what may prove a more perilous task, he also wants to end the government-dominated Senate, which was created to “screen” and control politicians elected to Parliament’s House of Representatives.

On another delicate issue, Mr. Pita also boldly insists on opening Thailand’s discreetly cloaked, influential constitutional monarchy to public scrutiny and “reform.” Thousands of young people challenged police in Bangkok’s streets in 2020 with marches, satirical agitprop street theater, brawls, arson, and other acts, demanding the monarchy be opened up and made more transparent.

Mr. Pita knows those street demands resulted in arrests, imprisonment, injuries, and intimidation, including 15-year prison sentences for anyone convicted of insulting the monarchy. Some of his closest colleagues in the MFP were active in those protests. 

“We will use the Parliament to make sure that it is a comprehensive discussion with maturity, with transparency, in how we should move forward in the relationship between the monarchy and the masses,” Mr. Pita said Monday.