When young protesters took to Thailand’s streets in 2020 with a ten-point program for reforming the monarchy, Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a scholar of politics and international relations at the University of Kyoto’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies, saw a possible opening for political change and democratic reform.

“I thought, 'Oh my God, this is it. The time has come,'” says Chachavalpongpun, who, after the coup of 2014, was forced to flee Thailand and seek refugee status with Japan because of his critical views of the Thai monarchy and military.

What followed, however, was a profound shift by the Thai monarchy toward a more confrontational and legally absolute model of rule, Chachavalpongpun explained at a recent talk titled Five Years after the Youth Protests: The Thai Monarchy Strikes Back. Hosted by the Southeast Asia Program at Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), the event marked his return to APARC after he served as a 2015-16 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford fellow on contemporary Southeast Asia.

Chachavalpongpun describes the monarchy’s response as “overt power codification and defensive hyper-personalization”: a shift toward making royal authority more explicit, more personal, and harder for elected institutions or public critics to challenge.

He identified four interconnected ways this consolidation of power has unfolded:

1. Turning Royal Wealth into Personal Property

This strategy began even before the 2020 youth-led protests, according to Chachavalpongpun. After King Vajiralongkorn’s succession, legal changes in 2017 and 2018 transferred assets formerly held by the Crown Property Bureau into the king’s personal possession.

These changes removed the finance minister from the bureau’s governing structure and placed the assets, including land, cash, equity stakes, and investments, in the king’s name. This move “fundamentally altered the legal character of royal property,” creating a durable barrier against future public or democratic scrutiny, Chachavalpongpun explains.

The result is “a sophisticated legal hardening” of royal wealth: a firewall against public scrutiny and blurring the line between institutional assets and the monarch’s personal property. Now that the assets belong to the king, elected representatives find it extremely difficult to question the monarchy’s wealth.

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2. Using Political Gatekeeping to Nullify Electoral Mandates

Chachavalpongpun argues that, rather than relying on coups, the monarchy and its allied non-elected institutions have learned to work through electoral and judicial mechanisms by leveraging their network of proxy and institutional influence.

A telling example is the institutional process that prevented democracy icon Pita Limjaroenrat from taking office after he led the progressive Move Forward Party to a landmark victory in the 2023 general election and appeared poised to lead Thailand's next government.

Under the military-drafted 2017 Constitution, the 250-member upper house, whose senators are backed by a military-backed system, holds a joint vote to select the prime minister. To become prime minister, a candidate must secure 376 votes across the combined 750-seat parliament, effectively allowing an unelected upper house to dilute the power of the 500 democratically elected lower house. 

“For sure, you would not have 250 from the Senate voting for you,” Chachavalpongpun says. This is why Limjaroenrat failed to secure enough support in parliament. “So the almost prime minister did not get the vote. Even if you won the election, you did not have access to political power.”

Another form of political gatekeeping, according to Chachavalpongpun, is to neutralize the second-largest political party, as reflected in the results of Thailand’s February 2026 elections, in which the progressive People’s Party finished second but refused to join a conservative Bhumjaithai government backed by the royalist establishment and the military. He describes the accommodation between the Bhumjaithai Party and the populist Pheu Thai Party, the third-place finisher, as a kind of co-optation: an alliance that helped bring former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra back into Thailand while isolating the newer progressive movement.
 

3. Controlling the Monarchy’s Image

A third mechanism is what Chachavalpongpun calls “defensive hyper-personalization” that aims to “restore the monarch’s presence at the national centre, assert control over dynastic succession, and challenge the reformist narrative seeking to shrink the king’s political space.” 

For much of his reign before the 2020 protests, King Vajiralongkorn spent prolonged periods in Germany. This absence offered reformists a potent narrative of an absentee monarch while the country faced economic turmoil and COVID-19. In response to the youth-led protests, the monarchy has made efforts to re-centre the king as the focus of national life. This symbolic control involves maximising physical visibility through a busy schedule of rituals and ceremonies, granting audiences to the private sector, and oversight of royal development projects.

The monarchy has also sought to manage public narratives about the royal family and succession. Chachavalpongpun describes the official succession line as increasingly uncertain and argues that efforts to discuss possible heirs have narrowed as the royalist network has sought to control “what you can speak and what you cannot speak.”

“Stability in a monarchy also brings stability in politics as a whole,” he says, warning that uncertainty about succession could deepen political anxiety.

4. Expanding Legal Coercion

Finally, Chachavalpongpun describes the lèse-majesté law, or Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code – which punishes defamation or insult to the king, queen, heir-apparent, or regent with prison terms of three to 15 years per offence – as a central instrument for silencing criticism. Once deployed inconsistently and systematically, the law returned to active use at the height of the protests in late 2020 and is now applied systematically and broadly against ordinary citizens and activists. “The lèse-majesté is the automatic weapon to punish any disloyal subject,” argues Chachavalpongpun. This maneuver systematically silenced and institutionalized the criminalization of the political critiques raised during the 2020 protests and has been used as a tool for widespread political suppression. 

As a core gatekeeping apparatus, lèse-majesté is weaponized to disqualify democratic challengers. This strategy is exemplified in the August 2024 Constitutional Court’s decision to dissolve the Move Forward Party on the grounds that its platform to amend Article 112 constituted an attempt to "overthrow the constitutional monarchy," Chachavalpongpun writes in the journal article on which his talk is based. The verdict remains a perpetual threat against the People’s Party and future reformist movements.

“The systematic weaponisation of Article 112 is the clearest expression of the monarchy’s strategy of overt power codification and defensive hyper-personalisation,” writes Chachavalpongpun. “It translates the legal codification of financial power and the re-centring of the king into a concrete mechanism of state violence.” 

The state has also used the Computer Crime Act and, in Chachavalpongpun’s account, coordinated with military information operations and royalist vigilante groups to monitor and pursue critics online.

Thus, since the 2020 youth protests, these four strategies have consolidated monarchical dominance over wealth, government, symbolism, and coercion, Chachavalpongpun concludes. They mark a break from the older “network monarchy” and a pivot to a more confrontational model in which royal power is increasingly personal, codified, and protected from democratic challenge.