After the Bhumjaithai Party secured an unexpected but decisive victory in Thailand’s general election last month, many analysts were quick to assert that the country was in for a period of sustained stability. Under Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, the incoming government is seen as unthreatening to the royalist-military establishment that has shaped Thai politics since the 2014 coup. Unlike the progressive People’s Party, the runner-up and pre-election favorite, or even third-placed Pheu Thai, Bhumjaithai has not been subjected to the judicial harassment that has repeatedly dissolved reformist parties and nullified their electoral mandates.

Foreign investors seemed to agree: the day after the election, they poured the most money into Thai stocks in four years, signaling confidence in a Bhumjaithai-led coalition that includes several respected economic technocrats. Some analysts even suggested the government of Anutin – with its strong provincial networks and its ministerial power firmly in hand – could remain in power for a decade or longer.

Yet the stability argument is increasingly questionable. Allegations of electoral fraud and technical irregularities – including extensive vote-buying, compromised ballot secrecy, claims that barcodes on ballots may have compromised voter secrecy, and vote totals exceeding registered voters in some areas – have stoked fury across the country. Some critics have called it the most corrupt election in Thailand’s history. Bhumjaithai also faces potentially explosive corruption allegations, above all suspicions of ties to transnational scam networks that some have linked to the recent border tensions with Cambodia.

Where those grievances are most concentrated is in Bangkok, among the urban and educated classes that the establishment can no longer count on. The People’s Party swept all 33 of Bangkok’s parliamentary seats – outperforming even the remarkable 2023 showing of its predecessor Move Forward, which ran on a platform of reforming the military, the monarchy, and big business before being dissolved by establishment-backed courts the following year.

The widely criticized Election Commission had until April 9 to certify the results of the February 8 election. Despite the irregularities, it has already certified 499 out of 500 seats. The new government is now expected to take office in mid-April. The mounting opposition, however, may yet prove to be its undoing.

Orange Expansion

For many, if not most, Thais, the election controversy is simply the latest in a long campaign by the royal-military establishment to crush the reformist party and movement Thais colloquially call “Orange” – and the establishment quickly reinforced those views. In the days following the election, Thailand’s National Anti-Corruption Commission moved against 44 former Move Forward MPs, including current People’s Party leader Natthaphong Ruengpanyawut, ruling that they had committed serious ethical violations by co-signing a 2021 petition to amend Section 112, the country’s severe lese-majeste law, with full party dissolution a looming possibility.

Thai courts then sentenced four prominent pro-democracy activists, including human rights lawyer Arnon Nampa, to nearly three years in prison for speeches made at a peaceful 2020 rally, the latest in a relentless pattern of heavy lese-majeste prosecutions. Anutin has consistently stated he will not reform Section 112, rejecting calls for pardons and citing the People’s Party’s own retreat from the issue as evidence that demand for change has subsided.

These moves landed with particular force because they came against a backdrop of broader disillusionment – even among Thais who had long been skeptical of Orange. The establishment’s hardline approach over the past decade has steadily driven the educated urban middle classes – once its most reliable source of social legitimacy – toward the three iterations of orange-colored parties.

When Future Forward burst onto the scene in 2018, its ultra-progressivism resonated with younger Thais and a minority of older liberals, many of whom never shared the more mainstream urbanites’ reverence for the palace. More conservative older royalists, however, were still focused on the threat of Thaksin Shinawatra and his Pheu Thai party. General Prayut Chan-o-cha remained popular among them for his role in the 2014 coup that toppled the Yingluck Shinawatra government.

When student-led protests erupted in 2020 and 2021 following the dissolution of Future Forward, many older royalist-leaning Bangkokians reacted with alarm, particularly as some demonstrators openly criticized the monarchy under King Vajiralongkorn. This was the peak of what many political observers referred to as Thailand’s “generational divide,” which pit young progressives seeking to reform, and in some cases fundamentally restructure, the monarchy against an older generation of Thais, especially southerners but also Bangkokians and many others, who had grown up with a deep reverence for the institution under King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who passed away in 2016.

That divide persists today but is nowhere near as wide as it once was – and that narrowing became evident with the 2023 breakthrough of Future Forward’s successor party, Move Forward, in the capital. The People’s Party’s even stronger showing in Bangkok in 2026 confirms how rapidly those political dispositions have continued to evolve. The party is no longer associated only with younger, rebellious Thais and older leftists. It has become the most popular choice of the country’s more privileged social classes: the urban educated, the professional middle class, and the intelligentsia. Many older Thais may not fully embrace the People’s Party’s reformist agenda, but even for those who do not, their attitudes toward a party once tagged as the choice of anti-establishment youth have shifted considerably.

The Thaksin Twist

This shift among the Bangkokian mainstream began to accelerate in the run-up to the 2023 election, when rumors of Thaksin’s return – punctuated by his threat of a “landslide” victory – reawakened the old animosities of older, more conservative-leaning Bangkokians who had been in the Yellow camp at the height of the country’s Red-Yellow divide.

By then, harsh lese-majeste penalties had begun to muzzle the most overtly anti-monarchical voices among the youth protesters. At that moment of relative calm, the return of that older generation’s arch-nemesis landed with particular force among those who had previously kept their distance from Orange.

When Thaksin arrived at Don Mueang Airport on August 22, 2023, and knelt before a portrait of King Vajiralongkorn, his fiercest opponents did not see a conciliatory gesture. Instead, they found it unnerving – a perfect illustration of the political survivalism of a man devoid of any consistent ideology, and a reminder that his instinct for self-preservation and power remained unchanged.

The opaque deal that brought Thaksin back after 15 years in exile, which saw Move Forward pushed into opposition despite its election victory, was widely understood to have been designed to neutralize the reformist threat. Instead, it gave older conservatives still at odds with Orange a reason to reconsider. With Thaksin and Pheu Thai propping up the establishment rather than threatening it, many older, even conservative-leaning royalists tilted Orange, or at a minimum became far less hostile to it. Thaksin’s cynical accommodation redirected their old animosity away from Orange and back toward the man himself.

Last year, those shifts were reinforced. The leaked phone call between Cambodian strongman Hun Sen and then-Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra – Thaksin’s daughter and widely believed political proxy, subsequently removed from office by a Thai court ruling in August – provoked thousands of older Thaksin critics to protest in the capital, briefly rekindling images of the Yellow Shirts. But the more enduring political consequence may not have been the revitalization of right-wing nationalism. It was the quieter nudging of more moderate traditional royalists toward Orange, driven less by enthusiasm for its reformist pitch than by disgust at the alternative.

Throughout the era of Thaksin-aligned electoral dominance, from 2001 until 2019, Thaksin served as a powerful unifying force across Bangkok’s political spectrum, drawing opposition from arch-conservative royalists in the tradition of Gen. Prem Tinsulanonda, and even a minority on the left that did not identify with Thai royalism. The more mainstream political disposition of that era, however, was what political scientist Michael Connors called “royal liberalism” – a broadly democratic outlook that envisioned the monarchy as a stabilizing, unifying presence. No figure better exemplified this than Anand Panyarachun, who helped calm Thailand’s political crisis after the bloody crackdown of Black May 1992.

That Anand himself sensed something significant in the Orange movement was made clear at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand, where he made a surprise appearance during a 2019 speech by Future Forward co-founder Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit – a moment when Thanathorn and his party were facing more than two dozen legal cases, with dissolution by the Constitutional Court looming. Anand presented Thanathorn with a signed copy of his biography and wished him good luck. It was a small gesture, but from a man of his stature, it was not a subtle one.

That nod from the old guard was followed by Anand’s public criticism of the heavy prison sentences handed down under the lese-majeste law – a position that, coming from him, carried far more weight than the same argument made by young progressives suspected of republican sympathies. Together, these signals point toward a shift in Bangkok’s political mainstream – one that Thaksin’s own cynical return has done much to accelerate, and that Anutin’s administration has done nothing to slow.

A Rat in the Establishment

If Thaksin’s return gave older conservative Bangkokians a reason to look less harshly at Orange, Anutin has compounded that effect, playing a similar role in driving older Bangkokians toward the opposition, but with a sharper and more immediate edge. Thaksin is widely understood to have overreached after his return and to have paid a political price for it, ultimately landing in prison. By contrast, Anutin enjoys stronger military and corporate backing, and this is precisely why many Bangkokians view him as the more dangerous and durable threat.

Bangkok’s hostility toward Anutin – who is nicknamed “Noo,” which means “mouse” in Thai – is the latest chapter in a longer story of Bangkokian grievances against politicians who draw their core support from the vote-rich but economically less prosperous northeast. Even in the 1990s, many Bangkokians rankled at what they viewed as politicians using vote-buying and patronage networks to mobilize provincial constituencies. The old political pattern – what academic Anek Laothamatas dubbed a “tale of two democracies” – of provincial voters electing governments and Bangkokians tearing them down through street protests, media campaigns, and tacit approval of military interventions, became entrenched during Thaksin’s long run.

Yet something important has shifted beneath the surface. Many Bangkokians – and southerners – who participated in the 2013–14 People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC) protests that helped precipitate the 2014 coup now express some regret over that involvement. That sentiment is not regret for opposing Thaksin; that animosity largely persists. It is regret for having opened the door to military rule, for underestimating the democratic aspirations of rural voters, and for failing to anticipate that the generals would use the political crisis for their own long-term benefit.

That shift in sentiment has found a new focus in Anutin and Bhumjaithai, whom many older Bangkokians regard as the latest iteration of exactly what they spent decades opposing. The party’s de facto power broker, Newin Chidchob, who hails from the northeastern province of Buriram, lacks the educational pedigree and cosmopolitan veneer the capital’s middle class has consistently demanded of politicians it respects, whatever their political stripe. This class is exemplified by the Harvard-educated Pita Limjaroenrat, who led Move Forward into the 2023 election, or the Oxford-educated Abhisit Vejjajiva. Both Anutin and Newin have long been regarded in Bangkok intellectual circles as opportunists without ideology: Newin backed the Thaksin camp when it suited him, pivoted to the Democrat-led government of Abhisit in 2008, and later aligned with Gen. Prayut’s post-coup administration in 2019. That Anutin has now chosen to bring Pheu Thai – Thaksin’s political vehicle, now in significant decline – into his coalition has only deepened that impression among Bangkokians for whom the combination of BJT and Pheu Thai represents the worst of both worlds.

That reputation for transactional politics has only intensified. When Anutin was photographed bowing before King Vajiralongkorn at a ceremony on the eve of the election, the image provoked irritation not only among anti-establishment youth but among many older Thais with traditionalist royalist sympathies. Like Thaksin’s own performance at Don Mueang Airport in 2023, the spectacle of a politician widely regarded as opportunistic seeking royal proximity was unseemly to many. Sulak Sivaraksa, the 92-year-old intellectual long respected by Bangkok’s liberal establishment, questioned the legality of Anutin’s royal audience and called for the dissolution of Bhumjaithai.

Those concerns over Bhumjaithai’s power intensified late last year when Tom Wright and Bradley Hope, the investigative journalists best known for exposing the 1MDB scandal that brought down Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, published reports linking a South African-born fixer named Benjamin Mauerberger, operating under the alias Ben Smith, to transnational scam networks and senior political figures in both Cambodia and Thailand. The reporting, which included photographs of Smith posing alongside Anutin and other Thai elites, has been strongly contested, prompting defamation lawsuits and legal threats. Even so, the allegations have continued circulating in Thailand’s political conversation, reinforcing opposition claims that elements of the new governing coalition may be entangled in illicit networks.

The Old Guard Drifts

It is above all the corruption issue that has crystallized the broad coalition now forming against Anutin’s government – and its most powerful and surprising segment is one that, until recently, served as a brake on change rather than a driver of it.

Throughout the era of Thaksin-aligned electoral dominance, older traditional conservatives formed the societal foundation of establishment politics in Bangkok and the south. They stood against Thaksin, tolerated the 2006 and 2014 coups, and viewed Orange with suspicion or outright hostility. But hardline establishment efforts to eradicate Orange – dissolving parties, prosecuting MPs, weaponizing the courts – forced the People’s Party into a strategic pivot that disappointed many of its own supporters even as it quietly eroded the wall of conservative resistance the party and broader movement had long faced.

In the run-up to last month’s election, the party dropped its bid to amend the lese-majeste law, announced the appointment of a longtime arch-conservative diplomat who had defended the 2006 coup, and saw core figures, including Pita, apologize for past criticisms of the military. When the People’s Party then voted for Anutin as prime minister in September, shortly after Thaksin’s daughter had been removed from office by the courts, the backlash from within was sharp. Progressive supporters felt betrayed, former party members spoke out, and critics accused the leadership of sacrificing its principles.

These moves signaled that Orange was willing to operate within establishment constraints – but the establishment’s response has been to intensify repression rather than reciprocate, and in doing so, it handed the opposition a powerful argument. The combination of the party’s moderation and the establishment’s harsh response has shifted the sympathies of traditional conservatives in ways that would have seemed improbable a few years earlier. The irony is not lost on longtime Thaksin supporters, who spent years viewing these same conservatives – the yellow-shirted protesters, the PDRC marchers, the Democrat Party faithful – as the principal obstacle to democratic change in Thailand. That they are now drifting toward the same opposition camp speaks to how thoroughly the old political alignments have been scrambled.

Figures who would once have been unlikely Orange sympathizers have lent their voices to its cause. Sutichai Yoon, one of Bangkok’s most respected veteran journalists, long associated with anti-Thaksinism and deeply trusted among older Bangkokians and even southerners, publicly urged a vote for the People’s Party ahead of this election. Abhisit and the Democrats campaigned on a platform of clean politics, pledging to act as what Abhisit called a “copper wall and iron fence” against corruption and grey money. Then, after the election, Abhisit made clear that the Democrats would not support any coalition arrangement involving dark money, a reference whose target was unmistakable. Since the election, that chorus of criticism has since broadened further — academics, legal experts, and even a constitutional court judge have added their voices, not necessarily in support of Orange but in condemnation of the irregularities that marred the election.

Some long-time advocates of change have argued that an Orange movement without at least some acceptance from older traditional conservatives is unlikely to achieve substantial reform – that change, in Thailand, must be broad enough to include those upper and middle-class Thais who long revered the monarchy, even if they stop well short of endorsing the full reformist program. Orange appears to have absorbed that lesson. Rather than pushing the envelope as in earlier years, key figures have honed in on a grievance that Bangkokians across the spectrum share: corruption.

People’s Party MP Wiroj Lakkhanaadisorn framed the electoral choice in stark terms: as a coalition of progressive liberals and progressive conservatives united against traditionalists propped up by scammer money and vote-buying. The Democrat Party hammered the same theme in the south, where it trounced Bhumjaithai in party-list votes. That the Democrats – once the dominant political force in Bangkok and the south throughout the Thaksin era, and long viewed by Thaksin supporters as a core institutional obstacle to democratic change – are now aligned with Orange against a common enemy would have seemed unlikely a decade ago.

That alliance is widely expected to acquire institutional form. Political insiders have anticipated for months that the Democrat Party, which won 22 seats in the February 8 election, would formally align with the People’s Party in opposition. Moreover, Abhisit’s nephew Parit Wacharasindhu – 33 years old, Oxford-educated, politically polished, and widely regarded as one of the most capable young figures in Thai politics – is reported to be the frontrunner to replace current leader Natthaphong, who has said he is prepared to step down if a court orders him to suspend his duties in connection with the ongoing lese-majeste petition case. Unlike the movement’s earlier leaders, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit and Pita Limjaroenrat, neither of whom ever fully shed conservatives’ suspicions of ties to Thaksin, Parit carries no such baggage. A former Democrat who joined the Move Forward party, he may represent a bridge between the liberal royalism of the old guard and the progressive reformism of the younger generation.

A Regime Losing Steam

The structural problem for Anutin’s government is that it has inherited all the anti-establishment animosities present in 2020 and 2021 while creating new ones of its own – ones that have resonated deeply even with older traditional conservatives. The old royalist-military order never commanded electoral majorities in the northeast, but it could rely on Bangkok’s middle class, the south, and the Democrat Party to provide the social legitimacy for coups and court rulings against elected governments it disliked. That compact is dissolving, a process that has been underway since the founding of Future Forward, and is now accelerating as even figures from the Bhumibol-era elite drift toward the opposition.

What the establishment has gained is an electoral vehicle – Bhumjaithai – that the old royalist bloc never possessed. But the price has been to associate the establishment, in the eyes of older and even conservative Bangkokians, with precisely the kind of figures they spent decades opposing. Anutin is not viewed as a respectable establishment figure. To many, he looks more like a rat in the establishment.

It is a perception that figures once firmly in the establishment camp are now willing to voice openly. Abhisit warned after the election that whenever an electoral process is questioned and not accepted, unrest is inevitable – a striking statement from a politician who steered clear of the student protest movement and its more confrontational demands in 2020 and 2021.

The convergence of a contested election and persistent allegations of ties to criminal networks has given the opposition a powerful dual narrative that resonates simultaneously with younger progressives, older middle-class liberals, and traditional conservatives who might otherwise have little in common.

Thailand has entered similar cycles before: governments backed by the establishment but rejected by the capital’s educated classes, with tensions that rarely stay confined to parliament for long. What is different this time is that the opposition assembling against Anutin is unusually broad. It includes radical youth, middle-class liberals, and increasingly, traditional conservatives who have concluded that the regime in place since 2014 needs to go.

What binds them is not ideology – many older conservatives remain deeply skeptical of Orange’s more transformative ambitions – but rather a growing conviction that the government is corrupt to its foundations, and that the election that put it there may have been too. And as Thailand has learned time and again, when that conviction takes hold in Bangkok, it rarely signals that a government is built to last.