Thailand’s pro-democracy advocates may be idealists, but they are also realists with an active and popular movement. Their political claims are based on a way of thinking that centres on a notion of a better and fairer society first sought and won in 1932. 

In 2020 a youth movement known as the “People’s Party 2020” staged public demonstrations against the Thai military government. The group is among a range of protestors against a military dictatorship closely aligned with the monarchy who have radicalised Thai politics in the twenty-first century. Beginning with a military coup sanctioned by the king against a popularly elected civilian government in September 2006, the Thai ruling classes have attempted to maintain control of the political system and their efforts have always been greeted with popular dissent. The 2006 junta’s bumbling incompetence prevented them from consolidating power and led to a series of frantic efforts to shore up their position amid chaotic and bloody confrontations on the streets of the Thai capital Bangkok. A turning point came in May 2014 with another coup against the civilian democracy that, to the junta’s dismay, kept winning at the ballot box. The 2014 coup group was determined not to repeat the 2006 gang’s mistake in backing away from direct power. Martial law governed Thailand for nearly a year after the 2014 coup and public protest gatherings were banned. Since then, the military has used the court system to dissolve the Future Forward Party – a formal political party that is one of many popular democracy groups – because its appeal among young people threatens their hold on power. And yet Future Forward supporters and protestors like the People’s Party 2020 continue their calls to eject both the military and the monarchy from politics.

Popular protests have hoisted symbols of resistance drawn from many places including Hollywood and Western literature: protestors have raised the three fingered salute popularized in The Hunger Games films and have staged public readings of George Orwell’s 1984 as a means to resist dictatorship. They also have resurrected ideas and imagery from the first incarnation of Thai democracy 90 years ago. Here is where we come to the People’s Party 2020 links with the Thai past. The group’s eponymous inspirers were a small group of conspirators who in 1932 ended the Thai absolute monarchy and introduced a constitutional democracy that vested power in the people. The 1932 People’s Party and the origin of Thai democracy is largely forgotten among the public and the autocrats have tried to make sure it remains so. In this century, many symbols and much public architecture that the 1932 People’s Party built has been destroyed by the dictators. The textbooks of Thai history taught in the nation’s schools ignore the social importance of 1932 and instead hail the event as a magnanimous move by the then king to surrender his power to the people. Resurrecting 1932’s legacy as something other than a milestone in kingly benevolence is a brilliant move by the young protesters, and makes the autocrats very nervous.

What do the dictators fear? Above all, the 1932 revolution – as it is usually termed – unleashed a democratic idealism that quickly spread from the small People’s Party to large swathes of an excited and hopeful public. In the 1930s the People’s Party encouraged people to rally around the new democracy and its ideals. But the idealism unleashed by the People’s Party unintentionally exceeded their control and led to attacks not only on predictable targets, like the inequities of a hierarchic society inherited from the absolutist kings, but also to attacks on the People’s Party itself for not going far enough. The People’s Party became defensive and intolerant of criticism, which undercut its democratic façade and in part led to its downfall after World War II. Whether or not the People’s Party 2020 knows the full story of their predecessors’ foibles is debatable. It also is irrelevant, for two reasons. First, the mere titular imitation of the 1932 radicals is enough to scare the dictators. Second, the promise of 1932 remains a powerful weapon for those wanting a fairer and more participatory political system precisely because the promise remains unfulfilled 90 years later.

The parallels between the 1932 movement and today’s are striking in some ways. The original People’s Party were men who fomented their plans to implement a democracy while they were still in their 20s. They were fluent in foreign languages and inspired by progressive social movements in other countries, some nearby and some distant. They rejected the passivity and obsequiousness of their parents’ generation. The People’s Party 2020 and the dissolved Future Forward Party also comprise highly educated, cosmopolitan young people inspired by neighbouring democratic movements and global movements for social justice. They too are impatient with the patronising and simultaneously servile attitudes of the older generation. The establishment and critics have mocked the idealism of both period movements as naïve and impractical. In both cases Thai tradition has been on trial and the custodians of traditional politics have hit back by lambasting the movements as made up of dreamers and political amateurs.

The 1930s generation were, and those today are, indeed idealists, but not idle dreamers. Then and now, they have coalesced and made political claims based on a way of thinking that centres on a notion of a better and fairer society. In this scheme the better society is not a utopia – a nowhere – but a real work in progress that starts with them. The 1932 revolution was a new beginning in Thai history and the struggle for Thai democracy in the new millennium continues among young people for whom the promise of that remains alive and worth fighting for.

Arjun Subrahmanyan is Senior Lecturer in Southeast Asian History and Academic Chair of History at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia. Among his published works are Amnesia: A History of Democratic Idealism in Modern Thailand (State University of New York Press, 2021) and The U.S. and the War in the Pacific, 1941-1945 (Routledge Press, 2022, co-written with Sandra Wilson, Michael Sturma, Dean Aszkielowicz and J. Charles Schencking).

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