BANGKOK – Thai opposition lawmaker Pita Limjaroenrat returned to Parliament a day after the country’s top court cleared him of allegations that he had violated election rules, vowing to scrutinise government policies, including a multibillion-baht cash handout scheme.
Mr Pita resumed his lawmaker duties on Jan 25, after the Constitutional Court said his equity stake in a defunct media firm did not violate election rules, thus acquitting him of the first of two high-profile legal challenges he had to face in January and ending his six-month suspension.
The Election Commission brought the case in 2023 against Mr Pita, 43, after his reformist Move Forward Party won the most parliamentary seats in a general election in May. Shortly after the vote, a pro-democracy coalition made him its candidate for prime minister. But the media shareholding allegations were cited to thwart his bid for the premiership and threatened to disqualify him as a lawmaker.
A different multi-party coalition that excluded Move Forward was then forged, backed by the military-appointed Senate, resulting in a different businessman turned politician, Mr Srettha Thavisin, becoming Thailand’s prime minister and finance minister in August.
“I see it as a detour. There’s still the destination that I have to get to, even with six months lost,” Mr Pita told reporters at Parliament House. Among his focuses will be a scrutiny of some key government policy proposals, he said, including a 500 billion baht (S$18.8 billion) cash-handout programme for most Thai adults that has spurred concerns over long-term fiscal discipline.
Move Forward may also reinstate Mr Pita as its leader in an annual party meeting scheduled for April, after he stepped down in 2023 following his suspension.
The party’s performance in the May 2023 election led to an earthquake in Thai politics, given that its progressive platform openly defied the country’s royalist establishment. The Pita-led result challenged wealthy and entrenched conservatives who opposed proposals to break business monopolies, rewrite the Constitution and amend the country’s lese majeste law.
The court ruling focused on Mr Pita’s claims that he managed shares of now-defunct iTV only as part of an estate left after the 2006 death of his father and that iTV was not a media business since its government contract ended in 2007.
Thailand’s Constitution bars those seeking public office from owning shares in media companies. After Mr Pita’s opponents raised the issue following the election, all 42,000 shares, or 0.003 per cent of iTV’s total, were transferred to his younger brother.
To be sure, Mr Pita’s challenges are far from over. He and Move Forward will return to the Constitutional Court next week to hear another verdict about whether the charter was violated by the party’s campaign pledges to amend the lese majeste law that protects the monarchy from defamation, a much more serious allegation.
Next week’s ruling – if guilty – could prompt the Election Commission to file another petition seeking a dissolution of Move Forward and a ban on its leaders from active politics – similar to a verdict almost four years ago that quashed Move Forward’s predecessor, Future Forward.
“I anticipate some overhanging charges to keep Move Forward off balance and to give the court and the Election Commission a button that they can push later on,” said political science professor Thitinan Pongsudhirak of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. “It depends on when they think of you as enough of a threat that something has to be done.” BLOOMBERG
