Pita Limjaroenrat’s progressive party may have won the largest number of seats in Thailand’s general election, but it is far from certain that the 42-year-old businessman will succeed in becoming Southeast Asia’s next prime minister.
The charismatic leader of the Advance Party, who stunned Thailand’s royalist military elite with his election victory on May 14, ran as the sole candidate of the reformist coalition in the parliamentary vote for prime minister on Thursday.
But it faces several obstacles.
While Pita’s eight-party alliance controls 312 seats in the newly elected 500-member lower house, he needs at least 376 votes to become prime minister.
That’s because a 250-member Senate that was appointed by the military after the 2014 coup also gets to take part in the vote, which is expected to take place within hours.
Many senators have already indicated they will not vote for Pita because of his party’s bold promises to reduce the powers of the royalist army that has long dominated Thai politics. These include revisions to a law punishing insults to the monarchy, ending conscription and monopolies in the alcohol industry.
Even if Pita succeeds in Thursday’s vote, he also faces disqualification from parliament, as Thailand’s election commission says he violated election laws by owning shares in a media company.
On the eve of the crucial vote, the electoral body took the case to Thailand’s Constitutional Court, sparking protests in the country’s capital Bangkok and cities across the country. If the court decides against Pita, he faces 10 years in prison and a 20-year ban on politics.
Who is Pita?
Colleagues and friends have described Pita as “humble”, “skilled”, “open to compromise” and possessing a “mind and spirit intrinsically directed to public service”.
Born into a wealthy family in Thailand and known to his friends as Tim, Pita has previously said his interest in politics began during his high school days in New Zealand.
A “rebel” youth who listened to rock and roll and played the guitar, Pita’s family “sent” him to the “middle of nowhere in New Zealand”, where the only television available was Australian soap operas or debates in parliament, he told the Thai YouTube Aim Hour Program earlier this year.
He said he would listen to then New Zealand Prime Minister Jim Bolger’s speeches while doing his homework.
After returning to Thailand, Pita completed a bachelor’s degree in finance and banking at Thammasat University in Bangkok, before earning a joint master’s degree from MIT and Harvard in business and public policy.
In the first year of his master’s degree, he had to return home to Thailand to take over the family business, CEO Agrifood, after his father’s death. Pita was 20 years old at the time, but his leadership helped the company become one of the largest producers of rice bran oil in Asia, according to his friend Jesús M Acuña.
“Pita’s father represented that stereotypical strong leader figure in the company and when he died, that ship was adrift and the company would have been lost. So this young man, remember, was 25 years old at the time. He had to intervene. That particular challenge where he was able to turn things around and get the ship back on track into a successful business speaks volumes about his abilities,” said Acuna, a Mexican lawyer who was a classmate of Pita’s at Harvard. and a close friend who attended the politician’s 2012 wedding.
He has a “mind and spirit dedicated to public service” and “believes that the most important thing you can invest in a country is people: to prepare them, to give them the tools to fulfill their personal dreams,” Acuña said .
Pita later worked as head of operations for ride-hailing company Grab in Thailand. He made his political debut in 2018, when he joined Move Forward’s predecessor party, Future Forward, managing its agricultural policy. He was first elected to parliament in 2019, where he said he gained a new awareness of the “inertia within the system”.
Pita came to national attention with a speech in parliament that year about the plight of Thailand’s farmers, who he said were going into debt because of the high cost of agricultural production.
When the Thai constitutional court dissolved Future Forward and banned its leader from politics, Pita and the party’s remaining lawmakers formed the Forward Party.
The politician has described the nine years since the 2014 military coup, the second military takeover since 2002, as a “lost decade” for Thailand, pledging in an interview with the Public Service Thai Broadcasting that Move Forward wanted to “come back”. common sense in Thai politics”.
“We are about to do things. We are for decentralizing the country, de-monopolizing the economy and demilitarizing the country,” he added.
“Progress is not a straight line”
Padipat Sunthiphada, a Move Forward lawmaker who was recently elected deputy speaker of Thailand’s parliament, said “Pita knows the problems” of Thailand.
“He wants to change Thailand not just with a quick win, but to change it [governance] structure of Thailand, to change the nation. So he has very good understanding and is brave enough to speak in public [about Thailand’s issues],” he said.
What makes Pita a good leader, Padipat said, was also his openness to engagement and his ability to connect with younger and older generations.
“It is very simple and humble. When we work together, we work as a team and as equal friends in the game”, said Padipat.
Sirikanya Tansakul, the deputy leader of Move Forward, described Pita as a “very skilled person”.
“There are many topics that are very topical. And every time we talk about new issues, he is very quick to conceptualize things and come up with a solution or suggestion or recommendations that we can usefully publish as a party statement,” he told Al Jazeera.
His two colleagues also described Pita as a devoted father to his seven-year-old daughter, Pipim.
Pita has sole custody of the girl, according to Thai newspaper Khaosod English, after a bitter and bitter divorce in which his ex-wife filed a lawsuit accusing him of abuse. The petition was dismissed, and Pita has denied the claims saying in an interview earlier this year that “there has never been any domestic abuse in my family” and that he believed in “the rights of women, of families , of children and of politicians”. “.
Sirikanya said Pita puts her time with her daughter first.
“We have to fit our schedules around that. Sometimes, we have to have a meeting at an odd time every now and then, but he might not be able to because of his parenting obligations,” he said.
Speaking to Al Jazeera in mid-June, Sirikanya said he still believed Pita could win over some members of the Senate.
“With his qualities of humility and openness to compromise, he could win votes from the Senate. We are hopeful that we can overcome this,” he said.
The party, he said, focused on mobilizing its supporters.
“We have to have people on our side. That is why you would have seen him taking his time to meet with supporters, voters and people from the interior of the country, in the provinces. I think this is our way of doing politics. We know we come from the people, so we have to keep their supports to win in parliament,” he said.
Pita, for his part, has consistently ruled out revising the party’s campaign commitments to win the support of the Senate.
“The choice is to do your best and make sure you make it happen. Everything that’s out of your control will happen sooner or later. Because you think you’re on the right side of history. If that’s the case, then you always have the energy to keep pushing,” he told the YouTube show AIM Hour in February.
“Progress is not a straight line…it doesn’t happen overnight,” he added.
