Abstract:
This thesis aims to study the Palang Pracharath Partys political co-optation in the 2019 general election of Thailand within the undemocratic context. The questions asked by this study are: What kind of political context allowed the Palang Pracharath Party to preserve authoritarian rule via elections? How did the Palang Pracharath Party co-opt the elections into preserving the political power structure of the NCPO; what kind of tactics, tools, and operations were employed to achieve this? Using Maria Josues theories on co-optation strategies as a framework, this study employed qualitative research methods and used two information gathering tools, 1) in depth interviews and 2) documentary analysis. The results found that the Palang Pacharath Party used the political context to create the unfair electoral competitions, to exclude political opposition, and defeat them in the electoral competitions. In this way, the loser has to lean on the governments resource inevitably, to make the Palang Pacharath to get popular votes and to hold power as authoritarianism. The co-optation tactics used by the Palang Pracharath Party in the 2019 were as follows: 1) Leveraging political codependecies 2) Political appointments 3) Money 4) Budget and policies 5) Weaponising the judiciary to eliminate political opposition through dubious charges. These five co-optation tactics allowed the Palang Pracharath Party to win the 2019 election form a government that would directly inherit the authoritarian power seized by the NCPO.