The uniquely Thai way of sabotaging popular political parties and their leaders with surprising ease yielded further progress yesterday, as the fate of the executives at the helm of the Future Forward Party (FFP) and Thai Raksa Chart Party (TRC) were left hanging in the balance.
Prosecutors said they would decide two days after the March 24 general election whether to indict FFP leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit and two executives for the "crime" of criticising the junta on social media.
Later in the day, the Constitutional Court set March 7 as the deadline for its decision on whether to dissolve the TRC, as requested by the Election Commission (EC), for proposing Princess Ubolratana as its sole prime ministerial candidate. But a royal command confirmed she was still a member of the royal family and was therefore above politics.
Surasak Glahan is Deputy Editorial Pages Editor, Bangkok Post.
If the TRC is dissolved its executives could be barred from politics for a long time.
The two cases may bode ill for democracy in Thailand because of the apparent ease with which political rivals can be destroyed by seemingly trivial matters when they get blown out of proportion.
The cases hark back to the era of "party dissolution politics", which saw its heyday between the 2006 and 2014 coups. While the two parties' uncertain fate has dominated local news coverage recently, the elephant in the room has mostly been ignored, namely, the questionable merit of both cases.
The crime the FFP trio are accused of committing -- criticising the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) by virtue of putting "false information" on a computer database -- is farcical because freedom of expression is a liberty most of us enjoy on a daily basis without penalty.
However, this "crime" is no laughing matter as it can result in prison terms.
If the trio from the increasingly popular FFP were to win MP seats but were later indicted, their fate and that of the party would be uncertain after the poll. For example, would the votes they garner be disqualified?
Even though the NCPO has pledged to mend the political conflict and bring about reconciliation, its pursuit of this case suggests it is here to divide and rule, not heal.
What it did is exploit the law to bury Mr Thanathorn's political future. He is seen as the chief rival of the NCPO's chairman, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, in the race for the prime minister's post after the poll.
Additionally, the FFP is also at risk of being dissolved due to a tiny technical error in Mr Thanathorn's resume, as published on its website.
Activist Srisuwan Janya has asked the EC to disband the FFP for "deceiving and misleading voters" by claiming its leader served as the president of the Federation of Thai Industries (FTI), when in reality he had merely served as president of its Nakhon Nayok chapter.
The party corrected this detail immediately and has not tried to use Mr Thanathorn's credentials in its campaigning. This should be seen that it had no intention to deceive voters. And the fuss about it should end there. But the politics of sabotaging parties has capitalised on small errors, even technical ones, as a means to bury popular politicians.
It is now up to the EC to decide whether it will ask the Constitutional Court to disband the party. Given that the agency has acted in favour of pro-NCPO parties in the past, the FPP has good cause to fret.
While the EC is asking the court to dissolve the TRC for proposing the princess as its candidate, there are still some grey areas in this case that leave it open to debate.
As the princess had already relinquished her royal title, she consented to the party putting her name forward. If the EC believed her nomination was unlawful and a threat to the constitutional monarchy, shouldn't it just have disqualified her instead of seeking to dissolve the party as a whole?
Moreover, the nomination never attained legal validity because the EC had not endorsed it.
This case against the TRC is reminiscent of the dissolution of the Thai Rak Thai and People's Power parties for electoral fraud and vote buying, respectively. Like the TRC, they fell in the same political camp as ousted prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The rationale behind their dissolution is still being questioned by some academics.
The moves against the FFP and TRC have revived memories of past political conflict and instability and imply it could be resurrected, both before and after the poll.