Kay Young
The poor of Thailand have won for themselves countless progressive victories in the past two years. They have won social and economic policies that would be the envy of those from almost all other nations, but while other experiments in leftwing progressive parliamentarianism in Mexico, Sri Lanka, and Honduras receive their flowers, what of Thailand? Why has the country’s government been coated from the outside in a reactionary veneer? And why does the self-appointed progressive wing of the nation not consider such advances as victories? This article was not originally written to answer the above questions, this article was originally going to be written about the Orange movement, the self-proclaimed Progressive Movement™ in Thailand. But as it happens, it is the Orange movement which has forced the above questions to be asked.
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When one writes about Thailand’s ‘progressive wave’— the ‘Future Forward Party’, ‘Move Forward Party’, ‘The People’s Party’, AKA the Orange parties— one cannot examine it by itself. To understand the Orange wave, we have to dive back into the Red and Yellow waters.
Between 2001 and 2006, Thailand flourished. The populist eclectic billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra’s deal with the poor provided them with political and socio-economic rights in return for votes. This led to a short-lived golden age for the long-marginalised majority of the country. However, empowering the poor has always been a dangerous project, and Thaksin found himself couped and exiled by 2006. The movement that rallied behind the man, which perhaps outgrew the man, became the Redshirts.
For decades, Thailand’s politics was known to outsiders largely by a two-colour binary: Red Vs Yellow.
The Red Shirts; an assemblage of populist progressive peasants, the working class, former communist insurgents, vaguely anti-royalist individuals— all backed by a faction of big capitalists— trying to stake out their claim in the political sphere. They all held vaguely anti-Bangkok positions, with some of the Bangkok intelligentsia standing by their side.
The Yellow Shirts; your run-of-the-mill ultra-royalist middle-class urbanites, backed by the military and monarchy as well as a huge contingent of big capitalists, all holding staunchly pro-Bangkok views.
This coloured binary was also known broadly as a rural-urban divide and was interpreted by many as some kind of class war. Between 2006 and 2019, this binary engulfed Thailand, normalising a period of repeated coups, crackdowns, mass mobilisations, disappearances and massacres in the street. The Yellows, always unable to defeat the Reds at the ballot box, would fall back on the military to ensure ‘Peace and Order’, rather than permit any elected Red government.
Since 2019, a new political paradigm has emerged, one that replicates the former duelling colours. No longer Red Vs Yellow, the colours shifted ever so slightly to Red Vs Orange. In a bizarre twist, however, this shift has largely been interpreted by outsiders and those new to Thai politics as a political inversion ever since the Reds finally retook Parliament after the 2023 elections.
The once progressive Reds are now widely seen as the reactionary old guard, while the seemingly new Oranges are hailed as the emergent progressive force in the Kingdom. This domestic development was reported on through fawning pieces aplenty in the Western press; however, making sense of the situation through those alone will leave many with a shallow perspective. As a friend recently put it: “it’s like we’re on season 5 of a bad tv series, if you just start watching now the characters are going to be acting weird and you’re not going to understand fucking anything”.
This interpretation, that Orange are the new progressive force, while Red have become the reactionary old guard, looks all the more bizarre given the Red’s governing policies since taking office less than 2 years ago. To name a few; a massive expansion of universal healthcare including the introduction of universal dental care, raising of the minimum wage, mass social housing expansion, direct lump-sum cash handouts to the poorest 25% of the country, huge agricultural development funds for local communities, legalisation of same-sex marriage, a mass expansion of university scholarship funds for poor rural students and so on… Many of these policies are also structured in such a way as to decentralise decision-making from Bangkok and provide opportunities in the outer provinces. There are more, but listing all the progressive policies alleviating the lives of the poor and those on the periphery would distract us from the focus of this article.
Red policies are by no means socialist. They do not directly confront the owners of the means of production— the capitalists— but, as prominent Red activist Aum Neko often points out, the policies provide the poor with some kind of foundation upon which to build both a more comfortable life for themselves as well as build political potential.
In short, the Reds of today actually look much like the Reds of days gone by, yet where are their red flowers? Why have they come to be portrayed as political dinosaurs losing the narrative of progressivism to the Orange? Or… What does progressive politics even look like in Thailand?
The Orange People
To understand this, we need to closely examine who the Orange people, within parliament and their public supporters, actually are and what they believe. The Orange party was founded in 2018 and quickly rose to prominence in the following year. The founders of the first Orange incarnation were an alliance of academics, elite capitalists and high-level NGO leaders.
Almost all of them were former Reds who had grown dissatisfied with the Red leadership of a tight clique of Thaksin loyalists who, whilst Thaksin was in exile, seldom offered opportunities to those on the further fringes of the movement.
These were high-profile people who found themselves without the political home that they thought they deserved.
Ever since the 2006 military coup that sent Thaksin into exile, the Reds were the only political force to stand firm against the various military governments that gripped the nation. It was through this opposition against the military that the Thaksin coalition and the Red movement became such a large tent— with peasant farmers, big capitalists and urban academics, all of whom opposing the military for their own reasons, finding space under its roof.
By 2018, the latter two of this loose coalition had reached a critical juncture and opted to take a chance on the looming 2019 elections by breaking from the old pact and forming the Orange party. The three key faces of the movement exemplified what it was to become; the elite-capitalist with a heart of gold— Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit; the radical university professor— Piyabutr Saengkanokkul; and their spokesperson, groundbreaking journalist Pannika Wanich. All in their late 30s, all internationally educated, all Bangkok blue bloods to the bone.
Orange Party Leadership
These fresh faces stood in stark contrast to the old peasants, the village mafia leaders and the wacky shouty celebrities that had been the faces of the Red movement. Red leaders were old, goofy, spoke with funny countryside accents, they were crass, messy, they were certainly not literate in the new modes of social media. The Orange people, meanwhile, were clean, qualified, westernised, modernised and highly articulate in several European languages. The Orange leadership perfectly represented what was to become the Orange supporter base. Young, clean, middle class, highly aspirational, urban, and significantly anti-military/anti-monarchy. The Orange party pitched itself as the party of reform, the party of the new. While the Red leadership contained actual former communist insurgents who had spent their youth toiling in the jungle, the Orange leadership was staffed with academics like Piyabutr who could quote Gramsci and David Harvey.
For their younger university-educated supporters, this served as a dog whistle as they attempted to Left-wash the party, to coat it in a sheen of radical rhetoric, in a language only known to those already well-versed in Leftist vernacular. Naturally, this attracted Thailand’s small but tenacious Trotskyist movement for further Left-washing down the line. Spokesperson Pannika was able to bring significant mass media clout to the table, while simultaneously, with the support of younger, hungrier big capitalists, brought in by party leader Thanathorn, the party was able to appeal to the middle classes with a less radical sensibility. In short, those who had always felt uncomfortable being part of the old Red coalition finally had a place elsewhere to go.
Nevertheless, for all their elitism, the Orange people were firmly against the elite institutions of the monarchy/military and monopoly capitalists, a position that would bless them with the credentials of progressivism but also curse them politically and operationally.
Colour Clashing
This diversion of support was a heavy blow to the Reds, who had previously comfortably won every election since their founding with a clear majority. The rise of the Orange people, however, split the vote in the 2019 elections, allowing the military-backed party to remain in government— although they may or may not have allegedly been aided by some potential voting irregularities.
Ever since WWII, the monarchy had been the third rail of Thai politics; any critique or challenge to it was met by military coup, arrest, exile or disappearance, enforced by the Kingdom’s strict Lese-Majeste laws. This was something the Reds had learnt the hard way in the previous two decades, with countless dead and missing still unaccounted for. Of this, the Reds were not eager for a repeat, and so on any issues of the monarchy, they took a step back, held their tongue and focused on other matters in the Kingdom— a means of realpolitik, well-hued over the years. The Orange, however, were not so adept in such matters and found themselves at the mercy of the Thai lawfare regime that had been constructed to crush Red dissent in the previous decade.
While they were inept at realpolitik, the Orange people were adept at critique, which they did so endlessly. The military, the constitution, the laws that protect the monarchy, the monopolisation of the marketplace, conservative attitudes to gender, they critiqued it all. Alas, critique can only take you so far. Their proposed policies, simply put, were no different from the European soft left social democrat parties they wished to emulate. In a Western context, the Orange people would be at home with the likes of Kier Starmer’s Labour Party, or Trudeau’s Liberal Party. They demanded a Western-style welfare state, acting as if programs like the existing universal healthcare system established by the Reds a decade prior were non-existent. In reality, during the decade of anti-Thaksinification, the existing social security net had been stripped back and significantly underfunded to the point of collapse.
While the Orange people always sought to look westwards for their political inspiration, the Reds…well, the Reds have no analogue in the west. On a political-social level, urban Bangkok may share similarities with Europe, but the rural outer provinces, the Red heartlands, simply do not, and as such neither do their political representation nor aspirations. For this reason, outsiders, or even native Thais overly embedded in urban university-educated society, are unable to recognise where the Reds’ politics sit on the political spectrum. Indeed, on English language Wikipedia, they’re listed as ‘Centre Right’. Rather bizarre for a party that introduced universal healthcare, guaranteed high rice crop prices, developed mass infrastructure projects in remote areas, attempted to de-monopolise markets from the capital (OTOP) and, and I can not state this clearly enough, implement policy written by actual communists.
The reality of Thailand’s history as a U.S.-controlled satellite state during the Cold War, however, means that the aesthetics of Communism are still highly risque in the political sphere. As such, the Red party, though not their supporters, have shied away from describing themselves as (Capital L) Leftwing. With party leader Paetongtarn Shinawatra recently describing the party as having “Capitalism with a heart”. Indeed, the party has been good to big business, cutting corporate tax and selling some state assets. It has also in the past been ruthless on drug users and channelled outrageous islamophobia— a sin for which the party has since apologised for and promptly reversed policy. Perhaps this is why ‘Centre Right’ is used on Wikipedia. Here, I do not claim it to be a (Capital L) Leftwing party. Rather, something uniquely Thai.
Yes, the party was corrupt from head to toe, yes, leadership used their position to enrich themselves, yes, the internal mechanisms of the party lacked democratic accountability in the Western understanding, but this is Thailand, not the EU. The ultimate test of the Red party’s credentials comes at the ballot box, where time and time again they win the votes of the poorest, most trodden-on masses of the outer provinces, whom they then deliver for on a material level. Or, as Gramsci could put it, the Red party brought the subaltern into the political field, not as pawns but as conscious political actors with their own agency.
Unlike the Orange people, however, the Reds, both the party and the base, did not need to read Gramsci or attend SOAS to understand this; they used their own indigenous rhetoric drawn from their own indigenous lived experiences as ไพร่ใหม่ (“modern slaves”) under Thai capitalism. Thus, as it is wrong to call them ‘Centre Right’, I would argue that you can not categorise them as Left either, this is not the French assembly estates, this is not Europe, this is Thailand, this is Kalasin, this is Phrae, this is Phitsanulok. While some Red individuals could be described as Left or Right wing, the party and movement overall are something beyond the spectrum. Imposing conceptions of Western Liberalism on top of it simply does not fit.
The Yellowisation and Anti-Thaksinification
During the next four years, culminating in the run-up to the 2023 elections, the same old rural-urban divide became apparent yet again. Echoing the divide which had previously underscored the Red Vs Yellow era. The Orange became increasingly hostile to their real parliamentary foe, the Reds, attacking them along the very same lines as the Yellows had a decade prior. Accusing the leadership of being crony-local-mafia-capitalists and the supporters of being corrupt-ignorant-socially-conservative-country-folk, deceived by the charming devil himself, Thaksin Shinawatra.
It is almost impossible to explain, or even understand, just how much Thaksin is hated by a large segment of the Thai population. For those inside the Red world, he is a figurehead to rally around, he’s the man with the Bangkok connections, he’s the guy who can deliver on election promises, even though his politics might be a bit dirty at times, a bit of corruption here and there, they don’t care because his governments always deliver.
For those outside of Red circles, however, Thaksin is everything that is wrong and evil about Thailand. A corrupt ancient dinosaur who has managed to deceive ignorant peasants into voting for him. A phoney to his core, a liar, a swindler and the gravest threat to the country itself— whether that be against the monarchy, or perhaps he just wants to steal all of the nation’s wealth and give it to his family. It is frankly beyond my capabilities as a writer to articulate how despised this man is. What I can articulate, however, is why he is so despised, which comes from two angles.
The first is simply class resentment. Thaksin was an elite capitalist who betrayed his class and empowered the unwashed outer provincial masses. Rhetorically, this was always expressed in the local discourse as good vs bad people (คนดี vs คนร้าย), which may sound like an oversimplification, but that directly translates the major rhetorical point used at the time. Thaksin was a bad person, as were his elite allies. Bad people seek to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Whereas good people act benevolently to others, this benevolence will then be rewarded in kind. This may sound absurd to some Western audiences, but a specific example would be: if Thaksin receives a luxury watch from an elite businessman, then that’s a bribe and both parties are considered bad people. Whereas if coup-leader General Prayut receives a luxury watch from an elite businessman, then that’s a reward for his benevolence in staging a coup against the bad Red people, as such, these parties are instead good people. As absurd as it may sound, this accounts for the conservative critique of Thaksin.
The other angle is the decade-long anti-Thaksinification program led by every possible arm of the superstructure following the 2006 coup. Rather than blaming his voters, the program sought to blame Thaksin for the economic turmoil and political violence that rocked the country following his ousting. To this end, he was even blamed for the Ratchaprasong massacre conducted by the military against the Reds who were protesting the coup. In this depiction of Thaksin, the Reds are given no political agency of their own— the establishment reckoned that whatever the Reds may have done by joining the movement was in good faith; however, they only did so because they were tricked into it by the scheming Thaksin.
During the heyday of the Yellow movement, in the early 2010s, the Yellow shirts, while smaller in number, had been a potent organising force, backed by the Kingdom’s most powerful elites. Their rallies in their heartlands of Bangkok would draw crowds of hundreds of thousands. They successfully boycotted and physically blocked voting centres in 2013, as they knew full well they were due to lose another election to the Reds.
By the late 2010’s however, from the typical Yellow perspective, despite winning their battles against the Reds, with the aid of the military and judiciary, the Yellow movement had grown increasingly absurd. The radical fringes had taken over, with leaders like Suthep Thaugsuban calling for a return to absolute monarchy and a complete abolition of Parliament. Another significant development during this time was the death of King Bhumibol Adulyadej in 2016, and the coronation of his son the redactedredactedredacted King Vajiralongkorn, widely known for his redactedredactedredacted and redactedredactedredacted.
Frankly, after this point, supporting the monarchy was no longer tasteful for the higher-educated middle-classes, and with the arch pro-monarchists becoming increasingly farcical, the narrative of the yellow movement was a step too far even for some of the most reactionary conservatives. These Yellows flocked into the burgeoning Orange tent, where they were welcomed with open arms. While these arch-conservatives-turned-supposed-progressives would describe their switch as “seeing the light” and apologising for their previous positions, it was clear that they were merely following the political winds, bringing with them a significant voting demographic. Some were given prominent MP candidacy slots and were integrated into the Orange political machine. In this regard, it can hardly seem a coincidence that Yellow + Red = Orange.
Some particularly distasteful cases include that of the Eton-educated nephew of former Prime Minister Abhisit, Parit Wacharasindhu, now an MP and party spokesperson. Parit’s uncle was in power when the Ratchaprasong massacre occurred; as such, it is no surprise for Parit to have been a die-hard yellow shirt and an up-and-coming darling in their party before he jumped ship in 2019. Another case is Thithana Chunhawan— constituency MP — the London-educated daughter of an ultra-elite Thai political family. Her father, having formerly been Prime Minister and served as a minister in Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn’s military government, was responsible for the infamous massacre of Thammasat University students. She herself was a die-hard ultra-yellow shirt until she too saw the light and jumped aboard the Orange ship.
As well as these former ultra-Yellows, the Orange Party were able to open doors into politics which previously had been closed. As mentioned earlier, the Red movement and party had kept a tight clique of loyalists as the vanguard of the party. During the decade when it acted as the de facto sole opposition to military rule, many of the university-educated urbanites, who were rightly appalled by the military dictatorship, had no real route into politics, other than the relatively closed-off Red system. The Orange party, however, was able to bring these people into the political sphere, many of them mid-level urban capitalists, academics and NGO leaders– particularly the latter two. These are people who, in the Western countries which they sought to emulate, would normally have more of a say in politics, more doors into politics opened for them. Such people include the likes of future party leader Pita Limjaroenrat, who had tried, but failed, to break into the Red inner-circle a decade prior.
As Orange numbers grew and Yellow numbers waned, the Orange people increasingly focused their energy on attacking the Reds. They aimed at the same old target, Thaksin, following the Yellow playbook of a decade prior, they now lumped Thaksin and the Reds in with the military, monarchy and monopolist capitalists as all part of the same corrupt, archaic system. Ignoring the contradictions by combining all of their political opponents into one, they were able to operationalise a critique which punched down on the aforementioned marginalised poor, disguised by a veil of anti-Thaksin rhetoric, a rhetoric that used the language of the Left, the language of Gramsci and David Harvey, this rhetoric is what coated the veil in a progressive veneer. As the old Yellow movement splintered away into smaller parties, the Orange movement’s momentum grew, with their attention focused more and more on Thaksin.
Som Are The New Salim
There is an expression in Red circles. Som are the new Salim (Orange are the new Ultra-Right). This may seem contradictory on the surface given their anti-monarchy stance, but there is a deeper meaning. For the Salim (the Ultra-Right), protecting and upholding the monarchy was always just a justification for their actions, but their main aim, their true substantiation, was to protect their class position, to attack Thaksin and, by extension, the coalition around him, the Reds.
To contrast themselves against the Reds, the Orange promised a more dignified type of politics, one which ultimately could never challenge wealth distribution in the country, but it could make voters feel better about it. Realistically, the Orange offered little more than politics of aesthetics.
To understand why, we have to look back at their origins and, more specifically, their actual funders. The kind of capitalists who are born into wealth, educated abroad, own huge businesses, bust unions, exploit thousands of people, but are not in the ultra-elite. Try to imagine those who backed the Orange party as not Graeber’s 1%, but perhaps the 3%. Their railing against monopolies was little more than making space for their own micro-class in the market. These capitalists are younger, hungrier, more charming, cleaner, more dignified, good people. They look nothing like the bad people, the dinosaur elites of the old generation, yet they functionally inhabit the same class demographic and class interests as their predecessors. The many lawfare cases brought against the Orange party were not initiated because, as the judiciary claimed, they were a threat to the pillars of Thai society, but rather because they threatened to supplant one faction of capitalist elites with another.
The two consecutive leaders of the party, Thanathorn and Pita, are perfect examples of these types of capitalists. Both were born into vastly wealthy capitalist families, both inherited the then-shrinking family businesses as very young men, and used their hunger to expand and achieve tremendous success in the financial world. Both also have family backgrounds that reach into politics, with Thanathorn’s uncle currently serving as a reactionary MP in a military-backed party.
Ironically, this critique of the Orange party also applies to the Red. Just another party funded by capitalist elites looking into the political realm to expand their own market share. The key difference, however, is that in the Reds constituency, the on-the-ground supporters hold a degree of cynicism and class-consciousness that significantly changes their dynamics with the leadership. The genius of Thaksin was to ignite and, most importantly, deliver for the rural poor. This material-based politics is what won their devotion. Reds have a deeply held understanding of class-consciousness, material politics and hold their leaders accountable when they don’t deliver. The long-standing deal of the Red party with the Red voters, as articulated and practised by Thaksin, boiled down to: “Yes I am an elite, I know how the system works, vote for me and I will make it work for you too”, and for millions, despite all his faults, crimes and corruption, he did make it work for them. Reds are not the ignorant buffalos the middle-class make them out to be. They know that the party is corrupt, they know that it serves the elite, but they also know it serves them too.
The Red movement, more broadly, can be seen as a symbiotic relationship. The poor need the Red elites, and the Red elites need the Red poor. However, that dynamic, that same degree of cynicism mixed with class-consciousness was never, and could never be present among the Orange people.
A rhetorical analysis of the Orange leaders paints a clear picture of a politics that is composed almost solely of liberal idealism, which they themselves proudly claim. A good example of this can be seen through their choice of vocabulary when talking about the populous at large. The Orange people will typically use the term:
Prachachon (ประชาชน) — The people. Historically, this term has been used as a translation from the French liberal lexicon— a la gouvernement du peuple, par le peuple et pour le peuple.
Or
Polamueng (พลเมือง) — Citizens. A legalistic term historically used, typically in the NGO sphere.
Conversely, Reactionaries/Monarchists will typically use the term:
Kon Thai (คนไทย) — Thai people. Historically, this has been used by Thai nationalists since the era of the fascist dictatorships of the 1930s.
While Reds typically use two terms:
Por Mae Pee Nong (พ่อแม่พี่น้อง) — Fathers, Mothers, Brothers and Sisters. This is the term often used more colloquially at smaller gatherings or on village loudspeakers. Typically this term will be used by Red politicians.
Or
Samanchon (สามัญชน) — Commoners. Historically, this term has been used to refer to non-landed peoples. That is to say, those without capital, the poor. Typically, this term will be used by Red activists.
The final two terms, ‘Por Mae Pee Nong’ & ‘Samanchon’, are the only two that imply some kind of recognition of class or communality. This is but one small case study, but a small piece of evidence that the Orange people broadly do not have a structural critique of Thai capitalism. Rather, their surface-level critique is that monopolies are bad, that small businesses are good, that military coups are bad, elections are good, and in order to make the bad things into good things, we just need to do the opposite. This was about the limit of their actual pitch to the nation in regards to policy.
Again, rhetorically, the vast majority of their movement would rather focus on abstract notions of democracy, egalitarianism, liberty, fraternity, etc. This should come as no surprise, as it’s exactly what they had been taught in their Western social science seminars. Again, they themselves cite their influences as the kind of vapid, empty liberal politics that have come to be despised in the West— the likes of Trudeau and Macron. Such idealistic rhetoric, of course, appealed to those middle-class, urban, educated constituencies that they were developing, constituencies which chiefly have ideological disputes with the existing system, rather than material conflicts.
Thus, finally, we reach the Red’s primary critique of the Orange people: that they are an ideological movement, one based on and defined by the abstract rather than the material. To return to the Som are the new Salim argument. This phrase argues that the Orange movement is fundamentally idealistic, as was the Yellow movement of the past, while in the material realm, they offer no substantive alternative to the existing status quo as it is experienced day to day by the working classes, again the same as the Yellows of the past. Both Orange and Yellow are/were functionally the same movement; they filled the same political spaces and shared the same underlying good vs bad analysis of the Thai state and Thai capitalism.
2023 & Idealism
In 2023, national elections were held. By then, the old Yellow shirt movement had largely fractured in its former heartlands and been replaced by smaller parties. Now, in competition with the Orange, the Reds held steady. They stayed on the same messaging, the same tactics, and the same policies that they were founded on. They kept the same inner clique of leadership and the same local weirdo celebrities as candidates. The Oranges ran what was consistently described uncritically as a “Fandom Campaign” with Pita at the helm, the party leader winning votes for his good looks, charm, idealism and optimism rather than any kind of policy proposals. It was this mastering of the modern mechanisms of social communications and media, combined with the classic attacks on Thaksin, that successfully won the Orange party a minority of the vote in the election. With the Orange party winning 151 seats and the Reds falling behind at 141, with 251 seats needed for a majority.
The shades of blue are various fragmented pro-military/monarchy and/or independent parties.
Here we can see The Orange party’s supremacy in urban areas and The Red party’s prominence in the rural. There is an uncanny line-up, with the election map. It should also be noted that many of the urban working class are domestic migrants from the outer rural provinces, and due to Thailand’s voting system, their vote will most often be cast in their birth province rather than the province in which they work. As such, much of the urban working-class’ votes will be registered outside of urban areas.
Here we can see the results of the last free election back in 2011. What this illustrates is how The Orange were able to take votes from both Red and Yellow— confusingly, Yellow being represented here in blue. The results in Bangkok serve as the prime example of this.
The Orange party, despite winning the most votes, failed to achieve anything close to a majority. Coalitions needed to be formed. Here we will avoid much of the nitty-gritty of post-election coalition building. The short version is, the Orange attempted to form a coalition with the support of the Reds, however the Orange leader Pita, failed to submit the necessary bureaucratic paperwork adequately— in a very bizarre case of lawfare. He was thus unable to take the prime minister’s office and his party in turn was unable to form a government.
The Reds were then forced into a position wherein they had to form a coalition government and either take office by going into an undesirable coalition with a reactionary military-backed party, or step back and allow the reactionaries to hold the office. The Red party faced little choice but to swallow their pride and form a unity government with the very same people who had couped and literally murdered them in the past.
Today, Paengthorn Shinawatra, Thaksin’s daughter, is the prime minister, overseeing an uneasy cabinet of both Reds and staunch reactionaries. This deal also facilitated the return of Thaksin after over a decade in exile, a moment that the Oranges saw as the ultimate Red betrayal and evidence of their corrupt, bad old politics. This coalition also negates the need for another military coup d’état in the immediate future, as the military-backed parties could simply withdraw from the coalition and trigger the collapse of the government. In this sense, the Orange party have made a significant accomplishment in neutering the parliamentary powerhouse that was the old anti-military big-tent Red party.
Nonetheless, despite the shaky coalition, despite the dodgy political dealings, despite the clear and evident closed nature of the upper echelons of the Red party, substantial progress has been made.
To reiterate, the massive expansion of universal healthcare including the introduction of universal dental care, raising of the minimum wage, mass social housing expansion, direct lump-sum cash handouts to the poorest 25% of the country, huge agricultural development funds for local communities, legalisation of same sex marriage, a mass expansion of university scholarship funds for poor rural students and so on… All of this progress was possible despite a sizable reactionary presence in the cabinet.
This brings us to the question of what ‘progressive’ actually means in Thailand. Does it mean transformative social and economic policies? Or does it mean the westernisation of Thai politics to bring us somewhere along the lines of EU-style standards? Again, this is why the Oranges can be seen as a movement based on aesthetics and idealism, rather than one rooted in the material day-to-day lives of a country far from the EU.
There has been a long reactionary tradition in Thailand of looking Westwards in the name of progress. From King Mongkot in the 19th century, to the Khanatrasadorn of the 20th, to the Orange party today. All looked to the West to modernise Thailand in the Western image. Today, however, more than ever, with the increasingly self-deterministic mood of the global South, looking Westwards seems increasingly outdated and outmoded.
Much as the Red shirts used their own indigenous language and lived experiences to critique the unique nuances of Thai capitalism, so too does the Red party draw on the same strings. Neither Left nor Right, neither progressive nor regressive, they are a phenomenon unique to Gramsci’s periphery brought into the parliamentary fold. Uniquely Chaiyaphum, uniquely Phrae, uniquely Kanchanaburi.
As such, having assessed the current mood and history of the Kingdom, when critiquing the Orange party and their self-described progressive movement, perhaps it would be more apt to use the term Westernised.
Of course, those who wish to have a more Western-centric politics have every right to hold that belief and express it at the ballot box. A more substantive critique of the Red party certainly is there to be made, and has been touched upon in this piece. The question to answer for those who genuinely want substantive change for the poor should be: how can we develop a movement that runs alongside or even with the Reds, rather than destroy them altogether? Anything aside from that is to ignore and tarnish the aspirations and achievements of the poor as reactionary naivety, to negate it entirely, this is to fall into the trap of pure Westernised Orange idealism.
*Footnote
Initially, I intended this piece to be around 1500 words, but due to the Orange people’s insistence on extensive critique, it spiralled into a longer form. Nonetheless, there are still significant points not mentioned or expanded upon in the piece, such as the specifics of the lawfare cases both sides have faced, Red MPs defecting to Palang Pracharat and rejoining the Red party, repeated cases of reported patriarchal violence in the upper echelons of the Orange party and various cases of egregious lawfare and realpolitik on both sides. These, and many more aspects, have been spared for an attempt to assess the wider picture rather than the micropolitics.