The Phue Thai Party have always been a headache for the overly literate classes. For the governing elites of Thailand, they are a constant threat, a powerful force of both capital and mobilised dedicated supporters. For academics, they defy definition. Political scientists, time and again, fail to categorise them— being both a peasant-backed leftist populist movement and an alliance of big urban capitalists, they break too many rules. For economists, they cannot resolve the contradictions of a party that privatises some elements of state infrastructure while simultaneously investing massive sums of capital in building and owning other elements. They are somehow nationalist and judicially punitive yet woke and socially progressive all at once. Phue Thai bring both green-cap-wearing communists and luxury-watch-wearing real estate moguls into the same coalition. By all the rules of 21st-century politics, they should not exist, they should not be possible, but somehow they have been capable of creating this oft-misunderstood paradigm shift.
As the mood of the global south increasingly shifts towards a new paradigm, with the development of BRICS, the re-alignment of trade away from US-centric markets and new calls for economic sovereignty, states like Burkina Faso, Mexico and China are experimenting with new models that break from the political science textbooks. In many ways, Phue Thai’s vision was ahead of its time, with its golden years running between 2001-2006, yet the party is still alive today, affording us an insight into another potential future, another paradigm.
Origins
Since the birth of the modern Thai political settlement, at the time of the Sarit coup-d’etat in 1957, power in the Kingdom has, to this day, been conserved by a narrow, interconnected elite: the military, the monarchy, and an aristocracy-aligned old-money business faction. This alliance, which was designed for the Cold War, remained in place following the withdrawal of Beijing’s support for overseas communist parties and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In short, the reactionary necessity in which it was born is long obsolete. Today, it serves as a state apparatus that can only be described as slow, clientelist, bureaucratic, and fundamentally incapable of facilitating economic movement or even modernisation. The bloat of the regime could be seen most clearly in the capital of Bangkok, a city which had mushroomed well beyond its capacity, sucking in wealth and labour— creating an economic vacuum in much of the rest of the country. While Bangkok opened its skytrain at the turn of the new millennium, virtually no other inner cities even had local bus routes.
The first real crisis this coalition faced post-Cold War was the 1997 ‘Tom Yum Goong’ financial crash, which exposed the administrative incompetence of the traditional elite and created the opportunity for a new cohort of domestic national capitalists to step forward. This faction identified the old state as an obstacle to profit, demanding the state engage in economic modernisation and efficiency, as well as developing the maligned outer provinces by spreading the wealth from Bangkok outwards. This was the birth of Phue Thai.
The new coalition came about under Thaksin Shinawatra, an elite capitalist from the outer provinces who had made his fortune in Communications during the tech boom of the 90s. The party was initially founded as Thai Rak Thai. The key to its success was forging a genuine, if atypical, network of class collaboration. The economic imperative of the new bourgeoisie aligned perfectly with the material needs of the masses, creating a unified base against the bloated military-aristocratic network. Thaksin pieced together the foundations for his party with a wide range of political actors from military officers, elite business people, former communist insurgents and western-educated academics.
The party sought to appeal to the overlooked rural working class, who, since the death of the communist and mobilised peasant movement, had been suffering in near silence for decades. Under the previous order, their masses of votes were squandered and their electoral mandate significantly underutilised. Former communist insurgents turned into academics, guided by elite economists, they worked together to inspire a populist manifesto that promised universal access to healthcare, a three-year debt moratorium for farmers and one million baht of locally managed development funds for villages.
Thaksin’s communications empire became an electoral tool, used to spread the party’s message across the Kingdom. Despite being part of the political and business elite, Thaksin, through his Northern Thai background, was able to present himself as a caring pragmatist who would fight the notorious Bangkok elite on behalf of the rural peasantry. For the first time the poor were spoken to in terms not of moralist politics, but on their direct economic interests as a class. The party won by a landslide in their first ever General Election in 2001, having formed coalitions with several mid-sized parties and absorbing several smaller ones. Their opposition, the Grand Old Party of Thai politics, the Democrat Party, was left humiliated.
Action
Policies like the 30-Baht universal healthcare scheme and the Million Baht Village Funds were not patronage in the traditional sense; they were structural changes that bypassed the old bloated bureaucracy and established a direct relationship between the elected government and the masses. The spread of wealth was both geographical and class-based; this generated a new, tangible form of political engagement. Detractors constantly alleged that the party were simply buying support, but the reality was that the movement was largely self-organised. This was because the policies were designed in such a way as to allow local communities and leaders in the outer provinces to make their own decisions on how to implement them. Some may choose to invest their new financial and political capital in school buses, some in developing the local market space, some in building local healthcare facilities— redistributing not just wealth, but decision-making as well.
What these policies actually did was break down the remnants of semi-feudal relations in the countryside, integrating the peasantry into the national market and modernising the Thai economy. With the opening of new economic spaces, new and increased capital flows provided the hungrier bourgeois class with the will to break with their former compatriots (aligned with the older Monarchy-Military settlement) to side with the Phue Thai project. This, in turn, created a proletariat and peasantry that is no longer immiserated, as being a peasant or working in the outer provinces is now a viable economic option. In short, this class collaboration resulted in a new class of elite capitalists and a peasantry that are both living better materially and are also more politically organised and conscious of their shared interests.
In 2023 we wrote:
The very real divide of rural vs urban, while tiresome for many to continually relitigate, is still the primary antagonism in Thailand. Layered on top of this are those formerly rural people, who have moved to the urban centres for work, many of them spend decades in urban cores without being fully absorbed into them, for most, the dream is still to go back to their hometowns and live a dignified life. This issue is (or should be), at its core, class-based. Who can sell what labour where, and under which conditions?
Through understanding this principle, we can see that Phue Thai’s program of rural empowerment is not confined to improving the lives of solely rural people. In the Thai context improving conditions for urban factory workers begins in the countryside- with those rural to urban economic migrants. Such domestic migrants make up an estimated 30-40% of Bangkok’s population. Both anecdotally and via more official reporting it quickly becomes clear that this migration is largely economically coercive- that most rural born people living in the city would rather be living in the countryside.
Phue Thai’s approach had much in common- in regards to outcome- with extreme poverty elimination programs seen in China and more recently Kerala. In all three cases rural poverty was targeted, which then afforded urban migrants the choice of whether or not they wanted to sell their labour in the big city or back in their home town, eliminating, or at least decreasing, the coercive force of urban migration. This benefits both rural and urban workers, as rural workers benefit from improved investment in their regions, while urban workers from those regions now have leverage over their employer, in short, they can quit their factory job and go home to a life in the countryside. This then indirectly improves the labour conditions for all urban workers be they rural migrants or city natives. It’s this kind of complex knock-on-effect policy programs that Phue Thai have been so adept at wielding, but are not apparent to the urban middle classes.
This program, despite its ‘Left’ appearance, however, was only made possible by some ugly class collaboration with the likes of the aforementioned nationalist bourgeoisie and allies in the security state. Staunch right-wingers also held up the coalition, the likes of Khattiya Sawasdipol (Seh-Daeng), a Major General known for his rabid history of anti-Communism and Newin Chidchob, a billionaire demagogue leader from a notorious Eastern political clan known for its corruption and ruthlessness. The deal between the poor and this faction of the elite was a dirty one, a far cry from purist socialism, which in many ways is why the movement can never be described as socialist, yet somehow the ultimate outcome for the poor was very much like that of a socialist project, with living and labour conditions rising alongside political participation.
Compounding the complexity, following the economic crisis-driven surge in drug use, the party waged a brutal war on drugs against the Kingdom’s most downtrodden. Thaksin launched a campaign to rid “every square inch” of drugs within three months, imposing arrest quotas for users and punishing officers who failed to meet them. This resulted in thousands of innocent people being caught up in the crackdown, alongside far harsher sentences and severe prison overcrowding. Additionally, Thaksin leveraged post-9/11 Islamophobia: he sent 400 troops to Iraq, albeit under preasure from the US via the IMF, (gaining Major Non-NATO Ally status) and violently clamped down on the Muslim-Malay separatist movement in the Deep South region. This led to the infamous Tak Bai massacre of 2004, where 85 peaceful protestors were killed.
It is the opinion of this writer that these outcomes were a part of another, more ugly alliance, that is between the elites within the party and the police state. For decades, the military in Thailand had been the only power with a real monopoly on violence, which allowed it to enact more coup-de-tats than any other state in modern history. It could be theorised that the elites within the party supported the police state as a potential buffer/ future ally against the military, and the horror of the war on drugs and Patani were an ugly outcome of this alliance.
These controversies, however, only affected a relatively small chunk of the voting population. Conversely, in recent years, the party has pivoted to becoming extremely socially progressive, introducing the legalisation of same-sex marriage as early as 2013, as well as making trans-affirming healthcare accessible on the 30-baht universal healthcare scheme and officially participating in pride parades. Again, this breaks the political science playbooks; agrarian populist movements are typically known for undercurrents of social reaction, Phue Thai has learnt to turn that on its head, and the same goes for its foreign policy. While the party was initially islamophobic and close to the US bloc in the early 2000s, they have since recognised Palestinian statehood, joined BRICS and cooperated with Iran and Hamas (rather than Israel) to secure the release of the Thai citizens accidentally taken prisoner in Gaza.
For the vast majority, the party’s spells in government have been boom eras, which saw quality of life and opportunities rapidly increase. This was a deal between the new coalition of the elites with a huge portion of the population that had been previously overlooked. By endowing them with a sense of political agency on a local level for the first time— through bypassing the power of the traditional elite managerial class— the peasantry and working urban poor were integrated into the developing domestic market. In exchange, the party received their support and a national mandate without demanding a violent insurgency against capital or the state, as had been the case with the Communist Party of the past. Again, it was somehow a means of producing socialist outcomes without the socialism. This is what we are defining as Rainbow Agrarian Populism, developing a new mobilised conscious base, through means that should theoretically be contradictory, but somehow achieved astonishingly successful results.
The Response
Some in the movement will claim that under the party’s experimental norm-defying economic program that everyone was a winner, both rich and poor. That is only true from one angle. In reality, at the level of the elite classes, this was a battle between two factions. The hungrier, younger nationalist bourgeois class vs the older, more entrenched aristocratically/military aligned bourgeois class.
The military coup of 2006 against Thaksin began what would become a consistent cycle of coups and judicial interventions against the party and movement. Every single democratically elected Phue Thai government has since been overthrown, first in 2006 against Thaksin, again in 2014 against Yingluck Shinawatra. So too with a weaponised judiciary, resulting in a series of judicial coups against PMs Somchai Wongsawat & Samak Sundaravej. Both Thai Rak Thai (2007) and its successor People’s Power Party (2008), were dissolved by the Constitutional Court on highly dubious charges, and their executive members were banned from politics.
Meanwhile, that base of newly mobilised supporters began organising, the United Front for Democracy Against Dictatorship (UDD) was formed, members wore Red Shirts so as to contrast themselves from their political rivals, the PAD (People’s Alliance for Democracy), who wore yellow shirts. The Red-Yellow divide and their pitched battles would become emblematic of Thai politics. Broadly speaking, on one side, the rugged rural peasants who were willing to give their lives in defence of the movement that they had built as part of this broad coalition, on the other side, the urban elite who ultimately had the backing of the military to do their dirty work for them.
In 2008, the Democrat Party, the party with no popular support or mandate, was essentially handed governance by the military, reigning for 3 years. During the Democratic Party regime, mass red shirt protests erupted nationwide, leading to the famous prolonged occupation and subsequent siege of the Bangkok financial district. While the physical bodies of the movement were made up of the poorer masses of the alliance, the bourgeois element, too, remained loyal, and the two continued their class collaboration. For example, village farming associations organised protest rotas to cover each other’s wages while they took part in the occupation and worked with capitalists (like bus company owners) to ferry them back and forth from the capital. Utilising their new political agency and alliances that transcended economic coercion. The occupation came to a bloody end a month later when the military moved in to clear the protestors, killing at least 79 civilians- likely many more- including medical volunteers.
Following the 2014 coup and a long winter of military rule, the elite regime engineered the 2017 Constitution, creating a system with an appointed Senate explicitly designed to block a majority mandate from governing and attempted to permanently cripple the Pheu Thai movement. Years later, due to this prolonged institutional sabotage and a transfer of momentum to the Western liberal style Move Forward Party, following the 2023 elections, Pheu Thai had to make a painful, pragmatic bargain and form a coalition with its old military adversaries. This was struck to secure a path back into government and allow founder Thaksin Shinawatra to return from years in exile. Over the next two years, despite a tiny majority, they were able to extend universal healthcare to dentistry, begin a 99-year-lease social housing program, legalised same-sex marriage, give out a 10,000 THB cash handout to the poorest 20% of the population, create a program that gives one annual university scholarship to each district (this is particularly significant in rural areas) and this writers’ personal favourite; one community owned agricultural drone per-village. Again, Rainbow Agrarian Populism.
However, the deep state’s efforts to sabotage the government did not cease. Less than a year later, the judicial method was utilised again, leading to the removal of Phue Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin in August 2024 and again against his successor Paetongtarn in August 2025. Today, the highly reactionary Prime Minister Anutin controls the government, a reality entirely facilitated by the liberal Move Forward (now Peoples) Party, on the grounds that he commits to the dissolution of parliament and new elections by early January.
On Experimentation Contradictions
Through prolonged and violent repression of the Phue Thai project, the old ruling class blatantly reveals its opposition to the will of the electoral majority — especially when that electoral majority, just like Phue Thai, challenges the interests of capital, the state or its institutions.
The limitation, however, of Pheu Thai is that it is led by a section of the bourgeoisie; the party alone can never resolve the core contradictions of capital. Its goal is to create a more inclusive, efficient capitalism, not to abolish class society. When the interests of its capitalist leaders conflict with the interests of its working-class base, Phue Thai will, or should, ultimately side with capital. Yet, as is so often the way with Phue Thai, oftentimes, it just doesn’t seem to. This is where it differs from social democrat parties in the Global North– between North and South the buttons and levers of state available to administrators are entirely different. While social democrats depend on a robust welfare state and civil society, Phue Thai is dependent on a mobilised base actively engaged in economic re-allignment. This base includes peasant organisers, trade unionists, and everyday working people who see it as the only viable vehicle for challenging the entrenched power of the old elite. However, they are aware that the party’s leadership is thoroughly bourgeois and compromised. Their support is tactical, not ideological.
Phue Thai and Thailand’s poor exist in a rare state of political co-dependence seldom seen along such class dynamics. Today, under Western liberal democracy systems, mainstream Left parties’ relationships with their constituents increasingly boil down to support for social ideological ends. This can be seen in Thailand with the Western orientated Orange (peoples) Party who rely on rhetorical/ideological appeals- the same is true of parties like The Democrat Party in the (USA) or the Labour Party (UK). While on the Right the relationship is one of co-dependency, the Republican (USA), the Conservatives (UK) or Prachatipat (Thailand) existentially depend on the support of the elites to maintain their party, while the elites existentially depend on the party to maintain their elite class position.
In short, this symbiosis is often seen on the Right but rare on the Left. Indeed, this is the theoretical basis for socialist parties, where the party and the working class are so symbiotic that they function the same political organ. So what of the odd case of Phue Thai? Phue Thai, without question, depend on the poor- for their votes, electoral mandate and mobilisation in the streets. Simultaneously, the poor depend on Phue Thai. Ever since the end of the Communist Insurgency and the mass-organised peasant movement of the 1970s there has been no mass political force to produce substantive improvements in life for the poor other than Phue Thai. For the poor, when looking for alleviation, for food on the table, for housing and shelter, Phue Thai are the only political game in town. The relationship, despite the bizarre class collaboration, is without question symbiotic.
Socialism is about changing the economic system; in the 21st century, that is going to take some experimentation. Conditions today are not those of 1917, and as such require strange experiments and unlikely alliances— as they did then. Those who struggle and fail to define Phue Thai do so because of that experimentation. They don’t fit the end-of-history model, instead they offer an alternative. While this alternative is compromised and is a form of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie, it can still be seen as a stepping stone for mass mobilisation while simultaneously putting food on the plates of workers.
This experiment, through rearranging and redirecting, if not exactly redistributing, the economy via class collaboration, creates the conditions for a higher state of class consciousness. Thaksin and the bourgeois elements of Phue Thai are often accused of cynically using the poor to suit their personal political interest, but why shouldn’t we perceive it as that way round? This writer would argue that we can afford the poor the recognition to argue that it is just as likely that they are using Thaksin and his bourgeois allies to build some kind of socialism— albeit one without any of the symbolism of red stars and busts of Marx. Perhaps that is why the overly literate classes fail time and time again to recognise Phue Thai’s liberatory potential.
Like it or not, Phue Thai are the only force within Thailand capable of creating new paradigms, and as such, they are currently the only force with the capacity to challenge that old reactionary vanguard. Their success is a testament to the power of strategic alliances and mass mobilisation— one could also call it truly radical pragmatism. As the mood of the Global South continues to develop, so too does our analysis and response. Like we said in the introduction, the Phue Thai of the early 2000s were somehow well ahead of their time. In many ways, the new experiments in governing within the Global South are only now catching up with Phue Thai, and this is an experiment that we as socialists need to be a part of.
Note:
Writing in support of the Phue Thai party is not a very popular position for the educated classes of urban Thailand in 2025. We, however, are not running in a popularity contest, we are running a liberatory communist journal. Nonetheless, it is expected that we should be subservient to the new “progressive leaders” of the Orange People of the People’s Party and their many NGOs, or we should disengage entirely in political analysis and instead retreat into a world of forever-critique in our revolutionary ivory-tower, that is to say: critique all, support none. Again though, we are running a liberatory communist journal, our goal is to have our comrades fed, housed, cared for and empowered. As such, we have critically supported the Phue Thai Party ever since our founding, while never writing an explicit analysis of the party. The above was an effort to do so. You can hear us discuss this in more depth here.