Thirty-One Years of Being Loved the Same: Section 112, the People's Party Case, and the Grammar of Compromise in Thailand

Bangkok keeps its own November weather dry-season haze thickened in 2020 by half a million voices asking a throne to explain itself. Out of that haze on the first day of the month came thirty seconds of royal speech that has outlived the crowd the protests and very possibly the political settlement it claimed to describe. Asked what he would say to the students demanding reform King Vajiralongkorn offered "no comment" then smiling "We love them all the same" three times like a charm cast against interruption. Asked whether compromise was possible he answered that Thailand "is the land of compromise." Nearly six years on with Tantawan "Tawan" Tuatulanon opening a prison sentence for the very protest cycle the King was addressing with Arnon Nampa's cumulative lese-majeste sentence exceeding thirty-one years and with forty-four former legislators awaiting a verdict that could end their careers for having proposed a bill the question stops being rhetorical. If love as the King insists is distributed "all the same" why does the law built to guard his person distribute imprisonment so unevenly and what precisely should we call a compromise in which only one side is ever asked to concede. This commentary argues that the 2020 interview did not describe an existing field of accommodation so much as perform what might be termed affective sovereignty a mode of rule in which the warmth of royal language and the severity of royal law are not contradictory but co-constitutive each quietly authorising the other.

How Love Gets Measured in Years

David Streckfuss's foundational study of Thai royal-defamation law argued that lese-majeste has never functioned as an ordinary law of personal reputation. It operates instead as a technology for policing the boundary of the sayable converting political dissent into criminal biography. Nothing since has falsified that thesis. The caseload has only confirmed it at scale. Thai Lawyers for Human Rights records at least 1,999 individuals prosecuted in some 1,347 Section 112 cases since 2020 with well over five hundred still active. Tawan is among the newest names on that ledger. On 31 August 2026 the Bangkok Criminal Court convicted her over a 2022 livestream questioning why police had cleared a farmers' protest ahead of a royal motorcade sentencing her to two years without suspension. This came barely two months after a separate panel had acquitted her of a related charge over the same protest season. She has already survived two hunger strikes of thirty-seven and fifty-three days inside pre-trial detention.

Arnon Nampa's file is more extraordinary still. Since his first Section 112 conviction in September 2023 the human-rights lawyer has been sentenced in eleven separate cases arising from speeches delivered between 2020 and 2021. By mid-2026 his cumulative sentence had surpassed thirty-one years longer than the statutory maximum for any single offence achieved instead through the arithmetic of accumulation. He has been refused bail more than forty times.

What legal architecture produces such asymmetry from words alone. Ernst Kantorowicz's account of the king's "two bodies" the mortal person fused with the immortal office supplies part of the answer. An insult to the sovereign is never merely defamation of a person but an assault on the political body itself which is why the penalty bears no relation to any calculable injury. Giorgio Agamben's account of the sovereign ban supplies the rest. The Section 112 defendant is included in law only to be stripped of its ordinary guarantees the presumption of bail proportionate sentencing the very possibility of truth as a defence. Love in this architecture is not withheld from the accused so much as it is the ground on which their exclusion becomes legible. They are punished not as strangers to royal affection but as its ungrateful objects.

The Bill That Wouldn't Stay Buried

If Section 112 disciplines speech its ethics-law sequel disciplines representation itself. In 2021 forty-four Move Forward MPs co-signed a bill to amend not abolish Section 112. Two years later their party won a plurality of seats on that platform was denied the premiership by an unelected Senate and in August 2024 was dissolved by the Constitutional Court which ruled that the bill amounted to an attempt to overthrow the constitutional monarchy. In February 2026 the National Anti-Corruption Commission unanimously extended the logic finding the same forty-four guilty of "serious ethical misconduct" for the act of legislating. The Supreme Court accepted the case that April and hearings continued into the autumn with ten of the accused including the sitting leader of the successor People's Party carrying out their parliamentary duties under the shadow of a possible lifetime ban decided not by voters but by a tribunal.

Tamir Moustafa's comparative scholarship on courts under authoritarian conditions names this pattern precisely. Law serves as both sword and shield wielded to discipline opposition while insulating the regime from the appearance of naked coercion. Bjorn Dressel's work on the judicialization of Asian politics describes how courts once mere dispute-resolvers become the decisive arena in which election results are functionally reversed after the fact. Eugenie Merieau's account of Thai constitutional "bricolage" captures the improvisational quality of the outcome. A legal order is stitched together case by case to guarantee a result the political extinction of Section 112's reformers irrespective of what any electorate decides. A bill that never left committee that changed no statute is thus made to outweigh a general election. This is not the rule of law disciplining politics. It is politics wearing law as its disguise.

What the King Meant by All

Return then to the interview and to its grammar. "We love them all the same" is spoken in the royal plural the voice Kantorowicz would recognise as belonging to the office rather than the man. It is a performative not a description. It does not report a feeling so much as constitute a relation distributing affection as a sovereign gift rather than a citizen's entitlement. "Thailand is the land of compromise" performs an identical move. Compromise is declared not negotiated. Carl Schmitt's dictum that the sovereign is precisely the one who decides on the exception applies here with uncomfortable precision. The sovereign also decides what counts as compromise on whose terms and when the offer lapses.

Set this against John Rawls's account of an "overlapping consensus." For Rawls a durable political settlement requires reciprocity revisability and the standing of every party to renegotiate its terms. Measured against that bar the 2020 statement fails the test of its own vocabulary. Those it names as recipients of love are within months and years the same defendants filling the dock. Chantal Mouffe's distinction between agonism a contest among legitimate adversaries and antagonism a struggle against an enemy marked for elimination sharpens the diagnosis further. The interview performs the aesthetics of agonism warmth inclusion the vocabulary of "all" while the accompanying legal machinery enacts pure antagonism treating dissenters as existential threats rather than fellow citizens holding a rival view.

Thai political culture supplies its own vocabulary for what is occurring here arguably more precise than any imported theory. Bunkhun the reciprocal debt of obligation flowing from a patron's grace and Barami the accumulated moral virtue believed to justify hierarchical rule. Read through this idiom royal "love" is not a liberal promise of equal regard but a script of benevolent hierarchy a gift that obligates gratitude rather than confers rights. Compromise in that idiom is something extended downward and revocably. It is not something a citizen can claim as due. That "we love them all the same" excludes structurally those who have already fled the kingdom the exiled critics and the still-unresolved 2020 disappearance of activist Wanchalearm Satsaksit across the Cambodian border only confirms the limit of its "all." Love that stops at the border is not universal. It is conditional on proximity to the sovereign's courts.

Redrawing the Terms Nobody Signed

None of this requires abolishing legal protection for the institution of monarchy outright. Comparative constitutionalism offers calibrated alternatives readily available for adaptation a narrowed offence limited to the reigning monarch personally a public-interest and truth defence restricted standing so that any citizen cannot file complaints on a stranger's behalf and a presumption of bail consistent with Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which Thailand has ratified. Nor does it require sitting or former legislators to forfeit their careers for having done precisely what legislatures exist to do propose debate and let a bill live or die by its own procedural merits not by a tribunal's retrospective reading of intent.

What the record refuses is the comfortable reading of November 2020 as a monarch reaching however imperfectly toward reconciliation. Tawan's cell Arnon's thirty-one years and forty-four careers suspended over a tribunal's verdict are not compromise's imperfect residue. They are its actual content the fine print beneath the headline of love. A land of compromise properly understood is a land in which the terms of settlement remain open to revision by everyone who lives under them not a stage on which affection is proclaimed downward once in a grammar that was always sovereign and never mutual. Thailand does not lack compromise for want of royal warmth. It lacks compromise because warmth however sincerely felt was never the same thing as consent and a throne that mistakes the one for the other will keep discovering sentence by sentence exactly how much of "all" it never meant.

Prem Singh Gill is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland and a scholar at Thailand's public universities