[The military, which wrote the 2017 constitution that created the framework for the new government, appoints the 250-member Senate, giving it a built-in advantage before voting even began for the 500-member House of Representatives in March.]
By Muktita Suhartono and Austin
Ramzy
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Thailand’s
prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha, attending the coronation procession
for
the country’s newly crowned king in Bangkok on Sunday. He is expected
to
retain his post. Credit Athit Perawongmetha/Reuter
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BANGKOK
— Thailand’s opposition Pheu
Thai Party won the most seats in the country’s first election since a 2014
coup, but despite an alliance with other pro-democracy parties it likely will
not be able to form a government because of rules that help the military.
No party holds a majority of seats in the
House of Representatives, according to official results released Wednesday,
meaning selecting a prime minister could involve prolonged negotiations. But
the head of the junta and leader of the 2014 coup, Prayuth Chan-ocha, is
expected to retain his post as prime minister.
“This is what the election was designed for,”
said Pavin Chachavalpongpun, an associate professor of political science at the
Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University. “The election was
designed for the prolongation of military rule.”
The military, which wrote the 2017
constitution that created the framework for the new government, appoints the
250-member Senate, giving it a built-in advantage before voting even began for
the 500-member House of Representatives in March.
But opposition parties have questioned the
results, saying that rules were changed after the vote to give an advantage to
smaller parties.
The opposition Pheu Thai Party won 136 seats
in the House of Representatives, while a pro-military party, Palang Pracharat,
won 115. Another pro-democracy party, Future Forward, took 80.
Opposition parties said after early returns
that they expected to win as many as 255 seats, but they ended up with 245,
just short of a majority.
The House and the Senate together choose the
prime minister, and the pro-military delegates are closer to the 376 needed to
win that vote.
Uttama Savanayana, the leader of Palang
Pracharat, said he was confident a coalition could be formed.
“We will coordinate with other parties who
share our ideology and are interested in forming a government together,” he
said.
The results have taken six weeks to be
released, with the tabulation marred by delays and irregularities. The
allotment of 150 seats allocated by votes for particular parties — called
party-list seats — was particularly contentious. The election commission seemed
uncertain of how to apportion the votes, telling reporters at one news
conference to work it out for themselves after releasing 208 pages of returns.
The election commission has yet to release
full results on the number of votes cast for each party. But it confirmed that
one party-list seat is allocated to every 30,000 votes, down from the 71,000
votes it previously said was the threshold.
The election commission’s chief, Somchai
Sawaengkan, said the previous quota turned out to be untenable because it would
have resulted in too few party-list seats. He said Thailand’s constitutional
court granted his office the authority to distribute seats under its own
calculation.
Parties associated with Thaksin Shinawatra,
who served as prime minister from 2001 to 2006, and his sister, Yingluck
Shinawatra, who was prime minister from 2011 until 2014, the year the military
took power, have long been a major force in Thailand, although both have been
convicted in absentia of corruption-related offenses and live in exile.
Pheu Thai is the latest incarnation of the
party founded by Mr. Thaksin, which has won every national election in Thailand
since 2001. The new constitution checked the power of Pheu Thai by distributing
seats to a larger number of small parties. Mr. Thaksin’s allies created new
parties but one of those, Thai Raksa Chart, was banned after it attempted to
field the elder sister of the king for prime minister.
This year another pro-democracy force
emerged, the Future Forward Party, which attracted younger voters disenchanted
with established political offerings. Last month, the authorities revived a
four-year-old case against its billionaire leader, Thanathorn
Juangroongruangkit, who was accused of helping protesters flee arrest.
Representatives of Future Forward said it
lost seven seats under the election commission’s revised system of allotment.
“The number of votes for Future Forward Party
nationwide that got thrown into the drain is almost 600,000,” Piyabutr
Saengkanokkul, the party’s secretary-general, said Wednesday. “And when we
gather the votes from all parties that have been thrown out by the party list,
the number is at around 1,500,000 votes.”
In a report issued Thursday for Forsea, a
Southeast Asian rights group, Mr. Chachavalpongpun of Kyoto University detailed
a long list of cases of electoral fraud and irregularities, including
miscounts, government employees pressured to support pro-military parties,
accusations of vote buying and identity theft.
The apparent changes to the party-list seats
to benefit the military stands out, though, he said.
“The extent they were able to distort
regulations and also influence the election commission to go out of its way in
how to calculate, I find that a bit disturbing,” he said.
Austin Ramzy reported from Hong Kong.
