Selling Dreams Versus Same as Before: A Tale of Two Provinces

The People’s Party had a bad night on 1 February 2025, walking away with just a single Provincial Administrative Organization (PAO) presidency in the small Northern province of Lamphun. A close look at Phuket and Trat — which were previously touted as key battlegrounds for the party — clearly illustrates the challenges faced by Thailand’s orange parties in competing at the PAO level.

PAO heads typically run under vague feel-good banners rather than national party logos. The incumbent PAO president in Phuket, Rewat Arirob, ran under The Phuketians You Can Rely On; in Trat, Wichian Sapcharoen ran under the Group of Descendants of Trat. Avoiding national party affiliations allowed local candidates to forge pragmatic alliances that cut across party lines. This made them less reliant on the networks of vote-canvassers aligned with MPs. But in 2020, the Move Forward Party (MFP) spearheaded a new trend for party identification by PAO presidential candidates, believing that their orange brand was a surefire voter-winner (MFP was banned in 2024 and reborn as PP). This prompted Pheu Thai to follow suit in their key target PAOs across the North and Northeast.

Phuket was an obvious target for the People’s Party. MFP won all three parliamentary seats there in 2023. Unusually, the island province has very little agricultural hinterland: the predominantly urban population has an average monthly income per household of nearly 42,000 baht (US$1,244) in 2023, giving it a profile quite similar to Bangkok where MFP swept 32 out of 33 seats in 2023. The People’s Party fielded, on paper at least, an impressive candidate. The medical credentials of Lersak Leenanitikul, a brain surgeon and the deputy director of Phuket’s largest public hospital, were featured on all his campaign materials.

However, Lersak was a political neophyte and not a natural campaigner. As a cerebral figure more comfortable with policy proposals than grassroots electioneering, he struggled with the workings of the local game. Incumbent Rewat Arirob was an ex-MP for the Democrats, a party whose national standing had largely imploded. But Rewat benefitted from the tacit endorsement of the elite families which had long dominated the business and politics nexus on the island. These families were alarmed by the success of Move Forward in the 2023 general election, and were determined not to cede any more ground to the insurgent progressives. Rewat’s posters proclaimed: “We work every day, really do things, don’t sell dreams” – a direct attack on the ungrounded idealism of the People’s Party.

As the People’s Party discovered to its cost, PAO elections are generally won not by party image-building or well-crafted policy offerings. Rather, they hinge on local knowledge, patronage networks and a well-developed ability to get the vote out.

Lersak also found himself saddled with a mixed slate of mainly young and inexperienced PAO council candidates. Not one of them won. In a national election, Lersak would have been an ideal party-list MP, helping the People’s Party to finetune its policies for provincial healthcare provision. But Lersak was no match for Rewat’s formidable network of canvassers and local connections, or his easy manner with the voters. In the end, Lersak received just half his rival’s votes: 44,602 to Rewat’s 86,616. It was an extremely disappointing showing, not helped by Phuket’s extremely low turnout rate which worked against the People’s Party. Many younger party supporters of working age failed to go to the polls because they were employed outside the area, or had work commitments on that Saturday.

The small, sleepy eastern province of Trat, adjacent to the Cambodian border, was one that the People’s Party almost won. Their candidate, Chonlatee Numnoo, secured 35,588 votes, not far short of the 41,445 gained by the incumbent, long-serving PAO president Wichian Sapcharoen. The 78-year-old Wichian is reportedly unable to navigate the Internet. He was widely viewed as having outstayed his welcome. Chonlatee was a former senior government official who had taken early retirement after facing political pressures. He exuded a quiet, charismatic authority and understood the issues facing his native province inside-out. Practically everyone the author spoke to agreed that Chonlatee was the better-qualified candidate —  but several then privately admitted that they would be voting for Wichian, since he was known for his generosity in funding projects and his ability to get things done. One informant claimed that if someone like Chonlatee won the race, the PAO bureaucrats would remain within Wichian’s network of influence and would probably sabotage the new president’s initiatives. In essence, this would be the Thai version of the 1980s BBC political satire Yes, Minister, where sly civil servants acted against the interests of their political masters.

In the end, policies counted for little in the Trat PAO race. Wichian campaigned on the cheeky slogan “The same as before” – a direct riposte to Move Forward’s 2023 campaign theme “Not the same as before”. This time, the continuity candidate won. Indeed, one of the main reasons why the People’s Party came close to unseating Wichian was a split in the incumbent’s vote. Wichian’s longstanding deputy, Charoen Chalalai, tired of waiting for him to retire, ran against his old boss and peeled off over 20,000 votes, giving Chonlatee a real chance of winning. Without Charoen’s intervention, the Trat result would have looked much more like the one in Phuket.

As the People’s Party discovered to its cost, PAO elections are generally won not by party image-building or well-crafted policy offerings. Rather, they hinge on local knowledge, patronage networks and a well-developed ability to get the vote out. The 2025 PAO races in Phuket and Trat illustrate the limitations of the People’s Party’s ability to engage with the realities of local politics. One would have thought that the People’s Party would have learned enough from its failure to win a single PAO presidency in 2020; the 2025 races showed that it did not.

2025/88