There’s a lot of discussion and confusion about the role of local elites in the recent elections in regards to rural areas. Most media, up to now, focuses on party centric politics, personalities, and finance circulating in Bangkok, but if you want to understand how power actually moves in these spaces and economies, in these countries that are still predominantly rural, you have to look deeply at the village level. That’s where the foundations of patronage networks, those responsible for the win of ultra-reactionary parties like Bhumjaithai, become visible.
Just as an anecdotal case study, I used to live in a typical area in rural Northern Thailand, in the community you have a small group of capitalists, maybe five to ten individuals. Landlords, agricultural supply owners, small industry operators, etc. They are not major capitalists in any national sense. They are simply the local ones. And then you have everyone else: the people who work for them; the fieldworkers, construction workers, handymen, service workers, drivers, etc.
What outsiders or urbanites often fail to grasp is how stark the boss-worker dynamic remains in these communities. Setting aside the monetary dimension for a moment, the imbalance in social capital is profound.
For example, one auntie I became close with, born into one of the wealthier families. She is, in many respects, a very kind person. But her relationship with the rest of the village is complex.
She treats her workers well, better than any of the other local capitalists. She pays above the local average. When a worker’s water pipes burst, she pays for the repair. No loan, no repayment required. She covers medical expenses. Donates generously to weddings and funerals. During emergencies, she allows rent to go unpaid for months and she provides low-interest loans for major expenditures.
At a glance she seems extraordinarily generous, but there is another layer. This generosity is not altruistic nor does just dissipate. It accumulates as social debt, as Thai people call it, หนี้บุญคุณ (literally translating to moral debt). And this debt purchases loyalty. Her workers will go to considerable lengths to accommodate her. It is, in effect, a neo-sakdina (feudal) relationship, a modern iteration of a feudal-patron dynamic.
When she eats with her workers, she dresses down. Work clothes. Outdoor seating. Speaking the local dialect. She blends in, appearing as just another local who happens to be paying the wages.
However, when she meets with the other small capitalists however, she is a different person. Dressed well. Eating indoors, in air conditioning. Speaking in the Bangkok dialect. These are not people that urbanites wouldn’t recognise as being particularly powerful, perhaps they wouldn’t even be considered middle class. Indeed, urbanites do not have the same intra-class relationships that rural people do, due to sheer proximity and the nature of capital ownership, urban capitalists do not see and interact with their workers everyday, nor do urban capitalists share the same workers as rural capitalists do. It is in these social functions that a significant portion of conversation revolves around their workers, the commoners in the village: Who is reliable? Who is struggling financially? Who might become problematic? Without even really realising they’re doing it, they literally divide up the workforce, the local labourers and the local patronage. It’s a kind of mini-cabal. A “hyper-local elite village cabal” -these are the people who have historically been the vanguard of counterrevolution worldwide.
Of course, they do not frame this as a cabal. It is simply “how things work.” They have been socialised into it so thoroughly that it comes naturally. But in practice, these meetings function as informal divisions of the local labour pool and the available patronage. A hyper-local elite network. Quiet, informal, and deeply effective.
I occupied an unusual position in this environment as an outsider who happened to have moved there, possessing no monetary capital but enough social capital to move between groups. A kind of free agent. People spoke openly around me not because I was trusted in any deep sense, but because I existed outside the system’s categories. I could observe and what I observed was relationships of genuine fealty.
The workers don’t just do the work for the capitalists, they express real affection. Because Auntie does care for them in the most literal sense. When you live close to the edge, when a medical bill or a broken pipe could tip you into crisis, someone who intervenes is genuinely a life saver, a protector.
I remember reading Piers Plowman, the medieval English poem. The Plowman, the common man, expresses how deep his love is for his master (who in the poem is quite literally Jesus Christ). The Plowman’s love for his master is articulated as gratitude for protection. Without the master, the peasant faces untold suffering, hell itself. That is the feudal contract: grain & labour in exchange for protection. The peasant gives grain to the lord and the lord protects the peasant from invaders, bandits, external injustices etc. When someone protects you from collapse, from ruin, from the genuine threat of destitution, you can love them. They become, in a very literal sense, the person who cares for you most. It is this dynamic, which is not confined to medieval England, which is active now, in rural Thailand.
Notably, the strongest fealty from the poor to the rich does not come from the better-off commoners. They are more resistant, and often resentful of the “handouts” the very poor receive from the capitalist class. They can depend on themselves a bit more. The deepest loyalty comes from the poorest; those with the least margin for error. They depend on the local-capitalist-cabal most heavily. And this is where class tension actually concentrates. Not between the very rich and the very poor, but between the quite poor and the quite rich.
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All we have observed so far takes place within the context of the village level. But this structure extends upward. Auntie and her peers are not genuine elites. They are people who own some land and a few businesses. Above them are additional layers of capital, increasingly urbanised. At the regional level, you encounter the real centres of power, family names which are known in Bangkok.
How does this relate to parliamentary politics?
The Pheu Thai model, as I’ve written previously, was fundamentally a project of class collaboration, employing a form of Rainbow Agrarian Left-Populism. By de-urbanising wealth and localizing infrastructural decision-making, they bypassed those upper regional capitalist elites. Policies like interest free micro-loans and direct transfers gave commoners alternative sources of support. They no longer had to rely on the village-cabal for every emergency. Phue Thai did that job of very basic care for them. But this did not threaten the cabal itself as they, too, prospered from the de-urbanization of markets. On the hyper local level, everyone benefited.
However, with Bhumjaithai the deal is different. It’s absorbing and strengthening the position of that village-cabal as well as the capitalists immediately above them. Through using government agencies awarding contracts, kickbacks, assistance with permits, land disputes, and extra-legal protections. As well as a closer relationship with local authorities and the bureaucracy. If you’re looking at these two different offers from the perspective of the village-cabal class, The Bhumjaithai deal is probably a bit better, furthermore you will face stronger pressure from those capitalists above you to make the switch from Phue Thai to Bhumjaithai. The people that this deal doesn’t work for are those aforementioned “more well off commoners” who don’t depend on the patronage networks and “handouts” from the village-cabal- this is ultimately Phue Thai’s real base.
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A brief note on illegality.
These local relationships can, and sometimes do, shade into something resembling a mafia structure. Throughout rural areas illegality is pervasive. Drug production, trafficking, smuggling. Sex work and sex trafficking. Petty disputes resolved through paid violence, etc.
The enforcers in these arrangements tend to emerge from that very poor class- the same individuals who express the strongest fealty to the village-cabal. The owners of the enforcers labour, the ones directing their activity, are the members of that village-cabal and above. The police are often just another participant in this system, they are not opposed to this criminality providing they are given a cut of the profits and in exchange they maintain a tolerable level of order.
If you wish to rig an election at the local level, the apparatus is already in place. You have the institutional authority of the village-cabal with their ties to the local bureaucracy. And you have a monopoly on violence, distributed between the police and local enforcers. What Bhumjaithai were able to do, is position themselves and their allies at key nodes within these patronage networks, which extend from the elite 1% capitalists in Bangkok like party leader Anuthin, right the way down to the local village-cabal. This is not a new mode of organising, indeed large amounts of research into the topic has taken place in the region[1][2][3]. What’s new is Bhumjaithai’s speed of expansion, going from 50 MPs in 2019 to nearly 200 in 2026 (a comfortable majority).
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While it is ugly, it would be reductive to characterise this system simply as exploitation. The system does not depend on malice to sustain it, rather in a perverted way, love and affection. It only requires that the primary avenue out of hardship runs through someone else’s generosity. That is the trap, one of dependency, accumulated debt, and a form of devotion that is difficult to distinguish from genuine love and affection when no alternative has ever been available.
The people at the bottom of this structure are not deceived. They understand the terms of the relationship. But when the alternative is watching a family member suffer untreated, or losing one’s home, or falling into a spiral of debt from which there is no return, one does not typically choose rebellion. One works hard. One remains loyal. One may even participate in rigging an election. One says thank you. And one may, in fact, genuinely mean it.
This is what politicking at the village level actually consists of across the deeply flawed democracies of the region. The issue for these failures are deeply class based, not abstract debates over ideology or policy, but burst water pipes, debts, social capital, hospital fees, and low-interest loans. It is a system that reproduces itself through both coercion and care. And as long as that care remains the only functional safety net, the ultra-elite’s position is secured by the vanguard of the village-cabal.