People’s Party’s Natthaphong Ruengpanyawut Is Preparing for Power

Natthaphong Ruengpanyawut, Thailand’s opposition leader and head of the progressive People’s Party, stands for a portrait in Bangkok on Aug. 15, 2024.
Credit – Andre Malerba—Bloomberg/Getty Images

As election strategies go, third time lucky might sound a bit glib. But it’s difficult to identify any clear missteps by Thailand’s youth-led progressive movement, which over just seven years and two elections now boasts the Southeast Asian nation’s most popular political party.

“Our vision is to reform politics, the economy, and reduce social inequality,” Natthaphong Ruengpanyawut, leader of Thailand’s legislative opposition as head of the reformist People’s Party, tells TIME. “The core problems are the same as 20 years ago. We have to bring full democracy to our country.”

The circumstances that have so far thwarted the progressive movement’s bid for power could politely be described as byzantine (or the plain-spoken might just say crooked). In 2019, the progenitor Future Forward Party gained 17.34% of the national vote but was swiftly dissolved by Thailand’s Constitutional Court after a loan to the party by its founder, car parts tycoon Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, was deemed illegal. (Thanathorn was also banned from politics for 10 years.)

In 2023, the successor Move Forward Party performed even better, winning 38% of the popular vote and a plurality 151 legislative seats. However, it was blocked from forming a government by the military-appointed Senate and then dissolved by another court ruling, which decreed an election pledge to reform Thailand’s draconian royal defamation law, known as lèse-majesté or Article 112, was unconstitutional. (Move Forward’s charismatic and globally educated leader, Pita Limjaroenrat, was also banned for 10 years.)

Now rebranded as the People’s Party, and under the leadership of 38-year-old former software engineer Natthaphong, Thailand’s progressive movement is preparing to contest its third election—and, for supporters intent on bridling Thailand’s military-aligned elites, anything other than power would be branded a failure. “We have set the goal to have the majority seats in parliament,” says Natthaphong. “We have to make people believe that we are ready to run the country.”

Yet the manner those elections were agreed to has been contentious. On Aug. 29, then Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra was removed from office by the Constitutional Court for ethical misconduct over a leaked phone call with Cambodia’s former leader, Hun Sen, about a deadly border dispute, during which she called him “uncle” and criticized a senior Thai Army commander as her “opponent.”

With Thailand thrust into political purgatory, Natthaphong controversially agreed to back Anutin Charnvirakul, deputy prime minister and leader of the royalist Bhumjaithai Party, to become Thailand’s third leader in three years in exchange for elections within four months and a referendum on a new constitution. “A lot of Gen Z were just appalled and didn’t see any reason why the People’s Party couldn’t have just abstained,” says Duncan McCargo, a professor and Thailand expert at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

Although backing an ideological adversary in exchange for fresh polls risked alienating the People’s Party’s base, Natthaphong justifies the “very tough decision” as “benefiting the country rather than our popularity.”

Now the challenge for Natthaphong is to build on Move Forward’s remarkable showing in 2023 to win sufficient seats in the upcoming ballot to form a government and enact a bold agenda of decentralization, deregulation, and reducing the political influence of the military and royal palace. “Thailand has many serious problems: the military involved in politics, state capture, the centralization of our bureaucracy,” says Natthaphong. “So to fight on these core issues is to fight the few people who benefit from the current system.”

Whether Natthaphong is the leader to succeed where others have fallen short remains to be seen. While detail-oriented and well spoken, he lacks the star quality of either Thanatorn or Pita, whose booming celebrity brought a lot of disenfranchised young Thais to the progressive banner.

“The real basis of popularity for Move Forward was the so-called ‘fandoms’ built around the party leader,” says Napon Jatusripitak, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore. “Thanathorn and Pita were very much celebrities. Natthaphong, by contrast, has more technocratic, level-headed leadership and not really a lot of flair, which is not necessarily a good thing going into an election.”

Others disagree. Thitinan Pongsudhirak, professor of political science at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, says Natthaphong’s softer demeanour could help him avoid becoming a “lightning rod” for the embattled establishment as happened to the sometimes brash Thanatorn or more flamboyant Pita.

“Natthaphong has strong support within the party, has been doing a lot of the thankless policy work, and is good at messaging and communication,” says Thitinan. “He’s got oratory ability, is very articulate, and is really on message when speaking to Parliament. This guy is the real deal.”

The stakes are undeniably high—both for Thai society and the wider region. Thailand is America’s oldest ally in Asia and has traditionally served as a democratic beacon amidst more authoritarian neighbors, though its backsliding on that score is a source of anxiety in Washington as its military establishment leans closer to rival superpower China. The next election may well determine whether that trend is entrenched or reversed.

Certainly, Natthaphong knows that the electoral landscape has completely transformed in the two short years since his 70 million-strong nation last went to the ballot box. At that time, former army chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha—who seized power in a 2014 coup d’etat—was still Prime Minister after rewriting the constitution to guarantee a guiding role for the military.

Against this tumultuous backdrop, the 2023 election was framed as a referendum on military rule. But complicating matters, Thai political patriarch Thaksin Shinawatra—a former Prime Minister and father of the recently deposed Paetongtarn—returned to Thailand from 15 years of self-imposed exile just after the vote. Until 2023, populist parties Thaksin backed had won every election since 2001 only to be repeatedly ousted by judicial and military coups—turmoil punctuated by often deadly street protests.

However, Thaksin’s electoral dominance was abruptly halted by Move Forward in 2023, when his Pheu Thai Party was beaten into second place with 141 seats. Thaksin briefly allied with Move Forward in an attempt to form a government, but reneged on that deal to instead lead a motley coalition alongside 10 establishment-leaning parties, including two directly responsible for the 2014 ouster of his sister.

Natthaphong believes he can capitalize on dissatisfaction with Pheu Thai’s record to galvanize his compatriots’ burning desire for reform. In yet another twist, on Sept. 9 the 76-year-old Thaksin was jailed for one year by Thailand’s Supreme Court, which determined that the billionaire former media mogul had wrongfully spent time in a hospital in lieu of prison for in-absentia corruption and abuse-of-power convictions when he first returned to Thailand. Natthaphong says the most important thing is that Thaksin “has to accept the verdict of the court. If he decides to fly away like in the past, there will be many people who cannot accept his action [and] this will bring new conflict to the country.”

Thaksin’s destabilizing influence was also evident during Thailand’s recent border skirmishes with Cambodia, which led to hundreds injured, dozens killed, as well as Paetongtarn’s ouster. A key factor appears to be a personal dispute between Thaksin and Hun Sen that has left observers scratching their heads. For decades, the strongmen had been extremely close, with Hun Sen appointing Thaksin as an economic advisor to the Cambodian government following the 2006 putsch. Upon Thaksin’s return to Thailand in August 2023, Hun Sen was the first dignitary to visit the man he once described as his “god brother.” Yet in June, Hun Sen, who turned 73 in August, began posting unhinged messages accusing Thaksin of “betraying” him and causing “great turmoil.”

Following Paetongtarn’s removal, Hun Manet—Hun Sen’s son and current Cambodian Prime Minister—sent a formal message on Sept. 8 to praise Anutin’s rise to Prime Minister as “a reflection of the strong confidence in your leadership,” adding that he believed “our two peoples will enjoy prosperity and thrive in harmony and joy.”

Hun Manet’s gushing reception of Anutin given the nadir bilateral relations had just reached has raised a lot of eyebrows—not least given his father’s leaking of a phone call with Anutin’s predecessor was instrumental to her dismissal. While accusations of some grand conspiracy remain hearsay, Natthaphong says at the least the spat shows the peril of informal ties replacing official. “I truly believe that the conflict between Thailand and Cambodia right now is a problem between two big families,” says Natthaphong. “We have to get back to formal state-to-state negotiation.”

Thaksin’s chameleon-like shifting of allegiances is conflicting for Thailand’s progressive movement, whose leaders were all largely inspired by the former policeman’s attempts in the early 2000s to empower disenfranchised rural Thais and trim the entitlement of Bangkok-based elites. Natthaphong cites the 2006 coup that ousted Thaksin as his political awakening. He was a second-year undergrad studying computer engineering at Chulalongkorn when the generals seized power. “I couldn’t believe that a coup d’etat was happening again,” Natthaphong says. “I lost faith in our country at that time.”

Natthaphong credits progressive thinkers such as Thanatorn and leftist law professor Piyabutr Saengkanokkul, a key ideologue of the progressive movement, of “enlightening me and making me come out from my comfort zone to believe that we have to fix our politics together.”

Although Natthaphong is the fourth child of Bangkok real estate tycoon Suchart Ruangpunyawut, he denies being a member of the elite he rails against, highlighting that his parents only grew wealthy in his teens. “My sisters, brother, and I all shared the same room,” he says. After graduation, Natthaphong founded a cloud computing company before first getting elected as a Future Forward MP in 2019. Although married, he has no children and says any spare time is spent reading books on Thai history or watching Netflix political dramas like Designated Survivor. “Both the American and Korean versions,” he says with a grin.

Natthaphong’s technological nouse played a key role shaping Move Forward’s 2023 online election campaign, which was credited for generating a broad swathe of support across Thailand’s disparate regions. Thailand has long been hostage to antiquated patronage politics, with cash handouts and other inducements distributed via influential local families, known as baan yai, commonplace to foster support. Traditionally, conservative parties held sway in Bangkok and Thailand’s south, while Thaksin’s heartland was the rural though populous rice-growing northeast.

Move Forward’s savvy social media-focused grass roots campaign helped rip up that paradigm, though analysts say that more established parties like Bhumjaithai and Pheu Thai will likely just ramp up inducements next time in response. “We know that the patronage politics will be much stronger,” says Natthaphong. “So we must appeal to the masses to win the election.”

On top of the 151 seats Move Forward won last time, the party came second in over 100 other constituencies, and Natthaphong says his goal is win every one of those to secure a clear majority.

Of course, now that Bhumjaithai is in power, Anutin can wield the trappings of office to poach lawmakers from other parties to buttress his position. At the least, he could use his post to beef up his war chest to tip the upcoming election in his favor; at the worst, any swelling of legislative support could provide political capital to delay the election.

If one thing is for certain, People’s Party lawmakers aren’t likely to be up for grabs. While party defections are common in democracies the world over, and especially in Thailand’s venal politics—where allegations of politicians exchanging bundles of cash are alarmingly common—after Move Forward’s 2023 dissolution every single of its remaining lawmakers joined the People’s Party, albeit a handful were banned and others resigned amid scandals.

“The People’s Party relies on ideas, ideology, and policy platform to still be intact and coherent despite being dissolved twice,” says Thitinan. “We’ve never seen any party like this before in Thai politics.”

Certainly, Thaksin’s Faustian pact with his former elite enemies to keep Move Forward out of power—and two years of bungling Pheu Thai rule—means he can no longer claim the anti-establishment mantle, which today belongs to the People’s Party alone. But while that may serve Natthaphong’s interests to appear as the chief agitator for reform, losing his military foil could conversely prove problematic.

“Ordinary Thais don’t believe that they are living under military rule, or even semi-authoritarian rule,” says Napon, adding that backing the royalist Bhumjaithai in exchange for elections puts the People’s Party’s in “a very awkward position” in trying to characterize itself as antidote to the entrenched elite. “The People’s Party has lost its strong stance against military influence.”

Natthaphong sees things differently. “We knew that voting for Khun Anutin as Prime Minister must affect our party’s popularity,” he says, using a common Thai honorific. “However, the real issue in Thailand right now is that we must have a new constitution. So that’s why we make this choice.”

Indeed, Thitinan says the easiest thing would have been for the People’s Party to join forces with either Bhumjaithai or Pheu Thai to form a new coalition government. The fact that Natthaphong shunned power for new elections is “ridiculous by the standards of Thai political parties, or even worldwide,” he says, highlighting that, in Thailand’s traditional “money politics,” lawmakers sacrifice principles for “power, prestige, pork barrelling projects, and prospects for the next poll.” The People’s Party, by contrast, represents “new politics in Thailand,” says Thitinan. “It’s not about backroom deals. It’s about being transparent and accountable.”

Still, the elephant in the room remains the People’s Party’s attitude toward Thailand’s sacrosanct monarchy, since reform of Article 112 lay behind Move Forward’s dissolution. Natthaphong says that the Constitutional Court verdict simply stated that parties were not allowed to campaign on amending the legislation, so while he will keep such goals off any manifesto or stump speech, the movement’s ambitions remain unchanged. “Article 112 still causes problems in Thailand,” he says. “And if we get power, we will fix this law in compliance with the Constitutional Court verdict.”

Regarding the role of the Royal Family more broadly, Natthaphong says the “monarchy must be above politics … and still the core institution in Thailand. We must amend the law to reposition them and make them accepted by Thai people in the modern world.”

While moderate by Western standards, such sentiments remain anathema to Thailand’s ruling elite, and judging by the fate of the progressive movement’s previous leadership, Natthaphong knows any intention to reform this paramount institution paints an enormous target on his back. Asked whether he can be sure of escaping the fate of his predecessors, Natthaphong shrugs. “I cannot tell,” he says. “But I will do my best. We need political reform that makes independent bodies accountable to the people—not for the few.”

Write to Charlie Campbell at charlie.campbell@time.com.