You’re reading an excerpt from the WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest free, including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

       Pita Limjaroenrat is arguably Thailand’s most popular politician — but he now faces a decade out of public office. On Wednesday, Thailand’s constitutional court ordered the dissolution of Pita’s Move Forward party, arguing it violated the constitution by proposing an amendment of a law against defaming the country’s royal family. The order also came with 10-year bans on political activity for some of those who held executive level positions within the party, including Pita.

       The suave, charismatic leader was the face of Move Forward when the progressive, reformist faction won a stunning first-place victory in general elections in May 2023. But the political establishment in Bangkok, enmeshed in close to a decade of de facto military rule, had other ideas. Conservative forces moved against Pita and his allies, with the Senate, comprised of lawmakers handpicked by the regime, thwarting his coalition’s ability to form a ruling government. Eventually, the Pheu Thai party, one of Move Forward’s erstwhile allies, broke with Pita and joined hands with the same military that had thrown it out of power in 2014.

       Pita, cast into the opposition, has been subjected to a concerted campaign of lawfare targeting both him and his party. The Aug. 7 case was centered on Move Forward’s campaign pitch to reform Thailand’s draconian lèse-majesté laws that criminalize critical speech about the Thai monarchy; instead, these laws were wielded by the state to kneecap Pita and his party.

       The crisis spotlights how Thailand is a “competitive autocracy,” as Pita put it to me in an interview last week. “An election victory does not translate to governance here.”

       For almost a century, the Thai military has repeatedly interfered in the country’s fledgling attempts at democratic consolidation. It carried out some 12 successful coups in the 20th century; there were two more in the current one, as the country endured cycles of political unrest and division. Critics of the establishment, which include Pita, point to a kind of “deep state” in Bangkok of intertwined military, monarchic and oligarchic monopolist interests.

       The last two decades have seen that deep state whir into action to control political dissent and check reformists. Prior to Aug. 7, the judicial apparatus had already dissolved four popular political parties and disqualified dozens of politicians on various dubious legal grounds. That included the 2020 dissolution of the Future Forward party — the progenitor to Pita’s Move Forward, which saw the country’s electoral commission move against it following a successful debut in elections. In reaction to the surge of pro-democracy mobilization since then, state institutions weaponized the principle of lèse-majesté — insulting the royal family — to charge some 272 individuals. Conviction could carry a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.

       “Democracy is on defense here in Thailand,” Pita told me, speaking via Zoom from Bangkok. He stressed there was “no linkage” between a slate of powerful bodies, including the top courts and the electoral commission, and the popular will of the people.

       Move Forward’s dissolution may trigger a new rupture. “In the short term, there may be big protests across the country like those that happened when they dissolved Future Forward,” Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang, a constitutional scholar at Chulalongkorn University, told Voice of America last month. “But in the long term I’m more concerned that the conservative elite will actually succeed in slowly weakening the progressive movement, by banning MPs and dissolving whatever the next party incarnation is.”

       Pita laments that the Thai monarchy — a hallowed institution beloved by the bulk of society — “is being used in politics to destroy political opponents.” Instead, he argues, the monarchy should be kept above the fray and not turned into an instrument of suppression. “We want to reform Thailand while preserving the monarchy,” he told me.

       Pita is sanguine about the challenges ahead. “Our politics is about substance and not so much about form,” he said, suggesting it would not be too difficult for Move Forward to reshape into its next iteration, given that many of its lawmakers have experience already in seeing their faction dissolved.

       The party wanted to turbocharge Thailand’s sluggish economy with liberalizing reforms and decentralize what it casts as an overly centralized state, organized around a set of entrenched political and business elites in Bangkok. Move Forward lawmakers, in one instance, have cited the monopolistic stranglehold that two powerful conglomerates have over the production of alcohol in the country as symptomatic of deeper societal rot and inequity.

       Pita contends that such transformation is essential for Thailand to reassert itself on the world stage and in its neighborhood. A decade of military custodianship and quasi-military rule has harmed the country’s standing among Western democracies. “It’s very hard for the Thai government to have legitimacy to engage Americans and Europeans,” Pita said, and that reality, he added, has pushed Thailand, a U.S. treaty ally, “toward the Chinese camp by default.”

       If in power, Pita would have hoped to “recalibrate and rebalance” Thailand’s diplomatic relationships. At a time when looming U.S.-Chinese competition is reshaping geopolitics across Asia, he argued that Thailand is “punching well below its weight in terms of foreign cooperation,” and ought to be a more active player in upholding stability in Asia.

       As for the broader struggle against the Thai establishment, the 43-year-old Harvard graduate remains confident. Pita wants whatever has to emerge in Move Forward’s absence to “win bigger” and “win wider” in future provincial and municipal elections, strengthening their popular mandate and domination of public discourse while also abiding by the ballot box. The military and its proxies, Pita contends, would want nothing more than mass disturbances and unrest to justify deeper crackdowns.

       “We still have to think of politics as a long game,” Pita told me. “And to win a long game, you need strategy and you need patience.”