When the Palace Installs Leaders to Watch Them Fail

Thailand’s monarchy has perfected what might be called the politics of planned obsolescence. Anutin Charnvirakul’s elevation through a baroque coalition arrangement involving the opposition People’s Party and his own Bhumjaithai Party represents not political compromise but constitutional theater—a performance where the lead actor has been handed a script guaranteeing his own political demise. The question confronting Thai politics is no longer whether Anutin will survive but whether his installation as Thailand’s 32nd prime minister marks the final act of a monarchical system that has run out of credible moves. Has Anutin Charnvirakul become Thailand’s first disposable prime minister—a constitutional hostage designed to fail?

The answer reveals itself in the structural impossibility of his position. Political scientist Milan Svolik identifies two fundamental challenges facing authoritarian regimes: controlling the masses while managing power-sharing among elites.

A Disposable Leader

Thailand’s monarchical establishment has attempted to solve both simultaneously by creating what amounts to a human circuit breaker—a leader whose function is to absorb democratic pressure before snapping, protecting the system by sacrificing himself. Anutin’s commitments to constitutional reform and early elections represent promises the Palace will never permit him to keep, yet his government requires these promises for even minimal legitimacy. He cannot deliver without destroying the institutional advantages that elevated him, yet failure to deliver will brand him as just another establishment puppet. This is not political miscalculation but engineered contradiction, transforming the prime ministership from an office of power into an instrument of controlled failure.

Thailand’s innovation lies not in authoritarianism itself but in its peculiar constitutional camouflage. Unlike Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who consolidated power through constitutional revision and party discipline, or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who survived a coup attempt to emerge stronger, Thailand’s monarchy operates through what legal scholar Eugénie Mérieau terms “permanent crisis constitutionalism.” The 2017 Constitution does not merely constrain democracy; it weaponizes democratic procedures against themselves, granting unelected bodies like the Constitutional Court veto power over electoral outcomes while maintaining the facade of popular sovereignty. This creates what Jan-Werner Müller, in his analysis of populist authoritarianism, describes as “constrained pluralism”—the appearance of political competition within boundaries so restrictive that only establishment-approved outcomes remain possible. Anutin operates within this manufactured space, powerful enough to claim democratic legitimacy but constrained enough to pose no genuine threat to monarchical supremacy.

International parallels illuminate what makes Thailand’s situation distinctive and precarious. Poland’s Law and Justice Party and Hungary’s Fidesz achieved authoritarian consolidation by winning elections, then systematically capturing judicial, media, and civil society institutions.

The Inverse Authoritarian Problem: Institutions Without Elections

Thailand’s establishment faces the inverse problem: it controls institutions but cannot win elections. The People’s Party’s predecessor Move Forward won the most seats in 2023 only to be blocked from power through judicial dissolution, revealing that Thai democracy has become what political scientist Steven Levitsky calls “competitive authoritarianism”—a system where elections occur but cannot change who truly governs. Yet even competitive authoritarianism requires some victor to govern, some face to project legitimacy. Enter Anutin, neither strong enough to rule independently nor popular enough to claim a genuine mandate, but positioned perfectly to serve as what philosopher Giorgio Agamben might recognize as “bare political life”—a leader stripped of actual sovereignty, existing purely as constitutional placeholder.

The mechanics of disposability become visible in the coalition’s internal contradictions. Bhumjaithai thrives on fragmentation, positioning itself as kingmaker in unstable parliaments. Constitutional reform threatening this fragmentation would eliminate the very conditions enabling Bhumjaithai’s relevance, making Anutin’s reform promises structurally suicidal.

Meanwhile, the People’s Party has sacrificed ideological consistency for institutional access, betting that participation in a conservative government will yield future constitutional changes. This mirrors what political scientist Adam Przeworski calls the “democracy paradox”—opposition movements must choose between principled exclusion or compromised inclusion, and Thailand’s progressives have chosen the latter. Yet their gambit depends on Anutin actually delivering reforms, transforming them into hostages of his success. When he inevitably fails, either through inability or unwillingness, the People’s Party will have legitimized the establishment it claims to oppose while achieving nothing tangible in return.

Section 112 of Thailand’s Criminal Code, the lèse-majesté law criminalizing royal criticism with fifteen-year sentences, functions as what legal theorist Carl Schmitt identified as the “exception that proves the rule”—the untouchable principle revealing where sovereignty actually resides. When Move Forward’s Pita Limjaroenrat merely suggested reforming this law to prevent abuse, the Constitutional Court dissolved his party within months. This hair-trigger response demonstrates that Thai politics operates under what philosopher Jacques Rancière calls “police logic” rather than “political logic”—a system administering predetermined outcomes rather than genuinely negotiating power. Anutin cannot touch Section 112 without triggering existential establishment response, yet tolerating this legal weapon guarantees the progressive constituency viewing him as betrayer. He is damned by action and damned by inaction, a perfectly constructed no-win scenario.

Comparative constitutional theory reveals how exceptional Thailand’s crisis has become. Most semi-authoritarian systems maintain stability through either genuine electoral dominance (Singapore’s People’s Action Party) or crude suppression (Cambodia’s Hun Sen). Thailand’s monarchy attempts something more ambitious and ultimately unsustainable: preserving democratic procedures while guaranteeing anti-democratic outcomes, maintaining constitutional legitimacy while exercising extra-constitutional power. This requires continuously manufacturing crises that justify intervention, then orchestrating solutions that restore surface stability without addressing underlying contradictions. Anutin represents the latest iteration of this crisis-intervention cycle, but each repetition degrades systemic legitimacy further. Citizens learn that elections don’t determine governance, that constitutional promises mean nothing, that the entire elaborate democratic apparatus exists purely for show. Unlike Poland and Hungary, which face European Union pressure to maintain democratic standards, Thailand operates within ASEAN’s non-interference framework, insulating the monarchy from external consequences.

The Exhaustion of Legitimation

Yet this very insulation may prove dangerous, removing pressure valves that force authoritarian systems to occasionally accommodate popular demands. Political scientist Barbara Geddes argues that authoritarian regimes fail when their legitimation strategies exhaust themselves—when the stories they tell about why they should rule cease convincing relevant constituencies. Thailand’s legitimation narrative has frayed to transparency: the monarchy claims to protect democracy while repeatedly nullifying democratic outcomes, preserves constitutionalism while operating extra-constitutionally, demands loyalty while inspiring increasing resentment. Anutin’s disposability makes this contradiction visceral—a prime minister with neither power nor purpose, existing solely to maintain appearances that no longer convince.

The throne’s endgame has become visible in its inability to produce durable solutions. Every intervention since the 2006 coup against Thaksin Shinawatra has worked temporarily before requiring another intervention: the 2007 constitution failed, necessitating the 2014 coup; that coup’s constitution failed, requiring continuous judicial interventions; those interventions have failed to prevent progressive electoral victories, demanding ever more baroque coalition engineering. Anutin represents not a new strategy but the exhaustion of all previous strategies, a leader whose very existence testifies to the system’s inability to generate legitimate governance. Political theorist Hannah Arendt argued that totalitarian systems ultimately collapse under the weight of their own contradictions, unable to sustain the fiction that nothing is what it appears to be. Thailand has not reached totalitarianism, but it has achieved something perhaps more unstable—a political order where everything appears democratic yet nothing meaningfully is, where prime ministers govern without power and monarchs rule without responsibility.

The question of whether Anutin is disposable or designed to fail resolves into recognition that these descriptions are identical. His disposability is the design; his engineered failure represents the system’s last remaining tool for managing democratic pressure without permitting democratic change.

The Last Pretense Falls

Yet this solution contains its own destruction. Each disposable leader who fails undermines the next one’s credibility. Each promise broken teaches citizens that promises mean nothing. Each constitutional crisis “resolved” through judicial coup or coalition manipulation makes the next crisis more severe. Thailand’s monarchy has won every battle through institutional manipulation, but winning battles is not the same as winning wars. The war for legitimacy, for the public belief that the system deserves to exist, cannot be won through judicial dissolutions and coalition engineering. It requires either genuine democratization or successful authoritarian consolidation, and the Thai establishment seems capable of neither.

Anutin Charnvirakul will likely fail as prime minister—fail to deliver reforms, fail to satisfy either progressives or conservatives, fail to establish durable governance. But his failure will reveal something more consequential than one politician’s inadequacy. It will demonstrate that Thailand’s system of managed democracy has reached its operational limits, that the monarchy’s toolkit for producing controlled outcomes while maintaining democratic appearances has finally emptied. The throne cannot play both sides against the middle forever because the middle has disappeared, consumed by the contradictions inherent in demanding democratic legitimacy while refusing democratic accountability. When Anutin falls, whether through his own political suicide or establishment betrayal, he will take with him the last pretense that Thailand’s constitutional order serves any purpose beyond preserving monarchical power. That revelation, once fully visible, cannot be reversed through any amount of subsequent constitutional engineering. The disposable prime minister’s most important function may be his last: making undeniable what Thailand’s progressive forces have long argued—that the system itself, not merely individual leaders, has become unsustainable.

Prem Singh Gill
Prem Singh Gill is a Fellow at the Royal Asiatic Society (England and Ireland) and a Visiting Scholar in Thai Public Universities.

Banner: Bangkok, Thailand - August 2022: Then Thai Public Health Minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, is seen at a media conference. Photo: SPhotograph, Shutterstock