One, inequality. It doesn’t matter if you’re a yellow or red, you’re all victims, you’re all casualties of this country’s inequality problem. Probably nobody wants to see Thai society face the problem of inequality that is only getting worse. The group seen as the yellows are townspeople or the middle class and they can only continue to be office workers. Many people will also never rise in class. People living in the country who are often viewed as being reds will certainly never escape from the same old poverty trap. The inequality problem can be seen as a common question for all sectors, but if you just divide people vertically, into yellow-red, they will refuse to speak to each other.

Two, decentralisation. During the campaigns for the nationwide elections, I went to Phuket. The people there wanted a special form of local administration as city, collecting their own taxes so that they would have money to use within their area. I went to Chiang Mai, and the people there wanted a special form of local administration. Many provinces around the country want to follow the path of a self-governing provinces. People in Phuket chose one party, Chiang Mai people chose another. If we separate people vertically it is difficult to talk, but if we separate people horizontally, we will see that they share the same problems.

Three, rights and freedoms. This should be a basic standpoint no matter what colour you support. Since the junta has been ruling for a long time, it is more obvious that all sides are attacked, both yellow and red. And if you look at the various issues, you will see that the protests about mines, the environment, land, air pollution include people of all colours.

Four, education. What do we do so that the Thai people have the freedom to find knowledge and not fall under authoritarianism?  All these examples show that we cannot divide people down the middle into two colours like this. We have to divide the people horizontally. Redefine who is ‘we’ and who is ‘they’, whether it is farmers, fishers, country people, townspeople, lower middle class people, lower class people or even office people, government officials, teachers, businessmen, start-up entrepreneurs, SME owners, labourers, everyone has their own problems and there are diversities and differences among them. A chain must be created connecting the problems of every person and every group for it to be compared equally. This will indicate the structural problems of Thailand and unites the needs of all these people in society in a clash with the elite who are the 1% that sucks up the resources, power and capital of the country in a single group. The rest of the people, no matter which colour they like or which party they support, they all go through difficulties while the elite 1% can stay the same forever, no matter if the government comes from an election or the army, without anything changing.

Now that we’ve looked at politics through these glasses, what would the new political landscape be like? How will the question of political management change? If people are divided horizontally, uniting everyone into ‘us’, how will we manage diversity since ‘we’ also have diverse benefits that even conflict with each other, as well as crossing over ideologies and classes?

Mouffe tried to collect all the victims of neoliberalism together to display that right now there is a crisis of neoliberal hegemony. Everyone is bound together in the fight to establish a new form of hegemony. This is what she thinks. Now, what tools or methods does she use?

The answer is to do a war of thought by entering all battlefields, even the enemy’s. Laclau always tried to suggest that you must enter and seize the definitions of all words that were constructed into a discourse. Each word started with an empty meaning. There has to be a struggle to seize the definitions.

The Podemos Party of Spain took these concepts and applied them. For example, the word ‘nation’ which the right wing often likes to use. When they heard this word, the left wing would reject it altogether. This leads to a lost opportunity to fight over and seize the definition. Podemos then contested the word ‘nation’ and redefined ‘nation’ as universal health insurance, as equality, and as living a dignified life from birth until death. They used the media as a tool to enter and take over all fields. If the mainstream media does not work, they build their own media into play. Pablo Iglesias, the first leader of the party, a former Political Science teacher at Madrid, knows that the Spanish are crazy about television. He set up one camera and created his own show, narrating the Game of Thrones series from a political perspective. He did it until he got famous, with a great number of viewers.

Once, after King Juan Carlos abdicated and Prince Felipe ascended the throne, in a meeting of the European Parliament when King Felipe opened the meeting, Iglesias at that time was a Member of the European Parliament under the Podemos Party before he stood in the national elections. He had long hair tied in a ponytail, a check shirt with the sleeves folded up, jeans and no suit or necktie whatsoever. When he met King Felipe, Iglesias shook his hand as a greeting and gave him a present. It was the Game of Thrones series and he just said that he wanted to His Majesty to watch it, to see that every step is a movement of thought. By contrast, left-wing parties in the past may have said, hey, we won’t meet you, we don’t support this system, which would waste an opportunity to fight on the battlefield of thoughts.

The important key in the fight on the battlefield of thoughts is the leader’s skill. The leader must have the ability to find all ‘our’ common points and be able to make the connection that what you’re facing is a result of structural problems, which is not difficult. In practice right now, the problem that both the Pomedos Party and La France insoumise Party of France have to face is that there is conflict within the party on many issues. One thing that may have to wait to be proven is that none of the parties established on the basis of these theories have ever been in government. When you mobilize people to fight against the elite, with as yet no administrative power, the problem is of another form. But the day you have administrative power, the test becomes more difficult.

How do these alternative parties answer the difficult questions of shifting from a battlefield of thoughts and words to a battlefield of concrete policies?

Both Podemos and La France insoumise tried to hold forums, pushing forward widespread and diverse popular participation, and holding various circles across the country. I have looked at Podemos’ policies and found that they’re really awesome. They cover all groups of people in lots of tiny little details. This is an example of solving conflicts between groups, and that is to hold as many forums as possible so that party leaders can have information that is complete and extensive, and use it as a basis for finding the common points of a diverse group of people.

In Europe, the main goal that Mouffe thinks about in creating this left populism is to fight on two fronts. One front is to fight against extreme right-wing groups by proposing itself as a new alternative for the people. If no left populism is created, they will definitely be finished by the extreme right wing. On the other front, we have to push forward the concept of left populism in place of neoliberalism.

Returning back to look at Thailand, I sat down and thought about why many people that came out to chase away Gen Suchinda Kraprayoon in May 1992 would turn to supporting Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha. The answer may be because these people were disappointed with parliamentary politics. Thailand does not have extreme right-wing parties like Europe, so they turned to the military instead. That is why we have to revive trust in the normal political system, so that people feel that voting in an election has meaning, not that once the election is over, everything is still the same. If a new form of political party is created, a new option will come about that will shake up the old form of politics.

This is the origin of the Future Forward Party where we applied these theories …. Choose us, and politics will change. 

Can you give us a concrete example of applying these theories in practice in establishing the Future Forward Party?

First, drawing a new line. We have to stop dividing sides into polar opposites or yellow-red and try to draw a new line indicating that this is a fight between ‘us’ normal people and ‘them’ the leading 1% that benefits from the existing political and economic structure.

Second, constructing the ‘people’ by uniting diverse people to fight on progressive topics together. It is a unity that raises the quality of the struggle in terms of issues, not just to unite in large numbers.

Third, repoliticization. In the past, politicization was removed from society (depoliticization). Politics was made into something dirty and disgusting, into a source of conflict and violence, into something boring. In addition, there are no debates on public topics left at all, just things that people with power, bureaucrats and technocrats have organised. That means people have completely disappeared from politics. We have to bring people back as the subject of politics. Make the people again think that politics is in their daily lives, so they have to participate a lot in politics.

The Future Forward Party is intent on fighting with ideas, seizing political definitions in all battlefields. The clearest example is on 24 March 2019. This was their battlefield. They designed the constitution clearly in a way that no matter what, they will get to become the government, putting the opposition at a disadvantage in every way. Even so, we have to compete, walk onto their field, and keep on fighting to point out the problems. We have to continue to grab topics. If the voices are enough, we have to propose amendments to the constitution. It is certain that under the constitutional amendment process that has been established, it probably cannot be amended, but we still have to continue to try and move the line.

With this way of thinking, lately I have tried to talk more about the word ‘nation’; to talk more about ‘Thainess’. Before we may not have had any interest, letting the conservatives speak, but today we have to redefine ‘nation’ and ‘Thainess.’

The ‘nation’ is the people. If there are no people gathered together, a nation would not come into being. That is why nation has the meaning of what to do for the people to live happily, to live with dignity, from birth until death; a nation is respect for the rights and freedom of the people on the basis that the people are the ones who hold the supreme power in the nation. Loving the nation is to have a shared objective in doing these things.

As for ‘Thainess’, it is what Thai people adhere to without oppressing diverse and different ideas, creative ideas and the ability to stand on the international stage.

Fourth, technology is alongside us, helping us to use media as a tool to spread our ideas fully. In our campaigning for the election we didn’t use leaflets or campaign signs much. Future Forward evaluated that this was the first election where social media would work at full potential, so we prepared for this. Again, in misfortune there is also fortune, since initially mainstream media didn’t welcome us much. They didn’t present news about us at all. That was why we had to create our own media team within the party, using social media to directly communicate with the people.

We made our first programme called Returning Fridays to the People, deliberately parodying the Returning Happiness to the People in the Nation programme of Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha. With similar names and the same broadcast time, we measured what Thai people would rather watch. When we campaigned to recruit new party members, we tried to hold a forum, create a town hall, use leading issues, invite people who have an interest in these matters to join, not just getting anyone to come, and working only with core members. When we campaigned for the election, we used infographics as an important tool, allowing people to easily understand through a few pictures.

In terms of communicating with society, we try to raise the quality but we also have to admit that it is quite hard to fix since Thai politics throughout the past 20 years has been stuck with the political marketing that the Thai Rak Thai Party started. That is, policies that are sold in short, snappy words, easy to understand. Say the name of the policy and bingo, they will definitely get votes, like 30 baht for all illnesses. In this field, even if we fight to the death, we will lose. And our problem is to construct a chain of equivalence, so we wanted to hit the centre of the structural problem. We tried to boost policies that concerned the structure of the country, but the difficulty was exactly that people found it hard to understand. Using the words Thais are twice equal, people still didn’t get it. We had to explain further, Thai people are equal, Thailand is equal to the world. We just had to continue fighting, but many of the words we used stuck, like switch off Senator.

Fifth, working in politics as a political project. The Future Forward Party doesn’t see just elections from time to time, so we didn’t want to fight just by using competitive language. We intentionally changed our political path so the people will start to think of the structural problems. We tried to change the format of speeches from just standing on the podium where the audience don’t have any participation to a new style of speech which is more fun, by including everyone and making it a forum where normal people can participate.

On the day of the big speech before the election of the Future Forward Party, only 3 core members spoke which are Thanathorn, Chor (Pannika Wanich) and me. The others were representatives of people of all regions and all types of people. When the Party’s mission is to unify the demands of all groups of people, the key is diversity. We wanted to reflect that Future Forward represents all groups of people. Representatives of the Northern region spoke in the Northern dialect. The Isan representative was Suphap Tinnarat (Mor Lam Suphap Daoduangden) who sang Mor Lam.  People from the Southern region wore Norah clothes. The MP candidate from the 3 Southern Provinces talked in Melayu on the stage, and the central region representative really is a farmer. There were also representatives of ethnic groups, the disabled and LGBT who made speeches.

After the election, the Future Forward Party still did not stop. Before, Thai political parties, once the election was over, would turn into parliamentary parties. Political parties shine brightest only during elections. After the election, they immediately go dark and they go just to parliament and to Government House. When the election comes around again, they open up the political parties again. In other countries it’s not like this. Their political parties carry out activities all the time. So Future Forward started work straight after the elections, not only by visiting people to thank them for their votes in various areas, but we held a forum ‘Future is now. Future Forward can start right now’ across the country. During the midst of despair, not knowing if after the election, how much we can really change anything, the Future Forward Party didn’t wait, we started right away with ourselves. We travelled to various provinces, campaigned for new members, held public lectures, organized fundraising activities, held forums to collect problems of various groups of people. Even though today we don’t know if we will be the government or not, we intend on working and collecting this information all the time. After this, we also plan to hold a Future Festival, a cultural festival with movies and music.

On social media, we started a show Future Forward knowledge market, a public lecture, using boards as if we were teaching in a classroom. I taught topics such as Coup d’état 101, Senators 101, Power Succession 101, Thanathorn also taught Financial Budget 101, and another one called Unfinished Democracy since democracy is a political structure without an end. It is changing all the time. Democracy was designed to keep adapting to the current times. This show will reflect the problems of democracy that has to change all the time, as well as Future Forward’s own problems.

We admit straightforwardly that the Future Forward Party is still not complete. If there are any problems, we will say so right away. For example, we have had a primary election within the party but didn’t succeed. We would then explain what the problems and obstacles were. We planned to send in more female and LGBT candidates, but we were not able to reach our goal. Our party has only 12 female MPs and 4 LGBT MPs, which is not as much as we had wanted. We also could not manage the party-list to be alternatively male-female. In all of this we revealed our imperfections; that we’re not people who do something and it succeeds immediately, but Future Forward is a political project that will slowly grow.

The Future Forward Party is trying to conduct politics in a new manner that is different from other parties. If we continue to persevere in our work, redefining new and old politics would happen right away. Many have already started saying, what party is this? I have never seen any party do this before. Why are they tiring themselves out by holding these activities even after the election? For me, this is creating a difference between new and old politics. If other parties see that we do it and it goes well, and any other parties also do the same, Thai politics would improve on its own.

Sixth, determining the time to ‘plant a flag’ or determining a new period for society. If we look back, we have already begun to plant many flags. The first flag is using all newcomers in politics. People didn’t believe that bringing in all newcomers as MPs would be possible. People criticise us for running nobodies just to collect party-list votes for the core members. But in the end, we had 30 constituency MPs. We campaigned without any hua khanaen [local party workers who organize voters using the patronage system]; we knocked on doors. We used a really small amount of budget on campaigning, I believe it is the smallest amount of all the parties. When there was no money, many candidates had to think of creative ways to campaign.

We flagged our policies, such as military reform, decentralisation. We planted a political flag, such as showing the continuation of power according to the constitution of Gen Prayut, inviting a debate further than just elected or non-elected Prime Minister. We framed it so that people would see that this election is choosing between whether they want or don’t want the NCPO to stay in power.

The day we went to receive the official documents certifying us as MPs from the Election Commission of Thailand (ECT), at first I didn’t think of going myself since I didn’t see it as anything important and could authorise someone else to collect the documents in my place. Thanathorn also thought that it would waste working time. But when we thought again, we saw that we can pick some topics to make people see their importance. Before, there were attempts to diminish the voice of the people, with the ECT as an important tool. We then used that opportunity to light a fire. I had guessed that when we received the certificates, according to normal practice, the media would ask us to hold them up for show. Actually, the ECT probably didn’t have any profound ideas by making the documents look beautiful, maybe intending for us to keep them as souvenirs. Then, when it was time for the media to ask us to hold up the documents for some photos, I didn’t show it and said that I became an MP because the people chose me, because of the ballots marked by the people and dropped into the box for Future Forward; the ECT has nothing to do with it, not with this kind of diploma. Or when I was charged for contempt of court instead of just ending the problem, we took the opportunity to start a lecture on contempt of court.

Simply put, at every step, in every crisis, we consider that it is always an opportunity to move people’s thoughts along. We try to use topics that social trends are interested in as the lead and try to adjust our pace all the time. We have to thank modern communication technology that has helped us greatly.

The difficulty of running this kind of party is managing the diversity, especially when the Party is drawing new lines of division, switching from the old game. You probably have to fight with both the old groups in the old game and new groups in the new game. How will we deal with this difficulty?

I will admit that it is really difficult. So far we have tried to survey the social media. The Future Forward Party often gets attacked the most by the group that is often called the “red shirts”. Are you a Democrat? Are you a yellow shirt in disguise? On the other hand, we couldn’t escape from the group that is seen as the “yellow shirts” either. Is this Thaksin’s party, a party in his network, a fake spin-off party? That is, we were attacked by both sides.

Political parties that use Laclau and Mouffe’s theory try not to stick to the orthodox. Not everything starts from revolutionising the working class or the labour unions. If it was Maoism, everything starts from the peasants, or in the Thai way, if anyone wants change just enter a pub, play Songs for Life, plant a red flag in the middle of the city, and end it with Chit Phumisak’s ‘Saeng dao haeng sattha khong’ (Star of Faith) song. On the other hand, new left-wing parties will try to change the words and change the way they speak to pull a large number of people to be able to participate.

One article by Iglesias in the Jacobin magazine said that ‘The Left can win’. Certainly, he doesn’t consent to losing the word Left but the Left like he is must not keep other people away and has to be able to pull people back. He used the word ‘founding people’ or like Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise, had youth volunteers to create a game. It is a game of a hero fighting against gangsters, chasing after and hitting rich capitalists who had evaded tax, hiding their assets in various islands. If you are still stuck with the old left methods, you certainly have no way to do it since you are busy falling in the same old romantic times that once succeeded in the 1940’s and 50’s, interested just in that.

I thought of the book Left-Wing Melancholia by Enzo Traverso. This book says that it is a crisis for the left wing. The left wing will always feel sad in their lives and feel that they’re the losers in a time of loss and go back to thinking about the sweet past like this.

Likewise, when you want to change society, you can start playing songs of Nga Carawan, listen to it so the fire starts, or watch Les Misérables.  Oh-oh, the fire’s blazing.  You preach and bathe your heart with movies and music, sipping wine and sit and eat happily. You finished watching it, OK, the end, let’s go out and continue business. It has become like this everywhere. In this age, I see that we have to get over this issue.  OK, you’re still Left but you have to change your fighting strategies to fit the times. People have a lot of diversity; the diversity of topics is also immense. More people have become liberals with modern technology. That is why you cannot continue to hold onto a red book, demand everyone to sit and recite it, sing songs for life, dress in the 5 ‘y’s.  [Translator’s note:  The 5 ‘y’s were เสื้อยืด (suea yuet – T-shirt); กางเกงยีน (kangkaeng yin – jeans); กระเป๋าย่าม (krapao yam – cloth shoulder bag); รองเท้ายาง (rong thao yang – rubber flipflops); and ผมหยิก (phom yik – curly hair).]  Anyone who does not conform is considered as not up to standard, then they would kept away. This cannot go on. There needs to be a new method.

How will the Future Forward Party deal with this?

Our test is the Party’s diversity. Right now, the test has not been conducted yet because we are still in the initial phase and the Party’s trend is still rising. That means everyone is compromising with each other since the bigger objective has not been reached. But the difficulty will immediately happen if we are the government since in the end you have to decide to do what first and later, choose to do this, choose to not do that. There will definitely be problems here.

Other than this, there is also a culture where different people think differently and have diverse feelings. For example, our LGBT MPs dressed according to their gender to report to Parliament. Then it appeared that on Facebook, a number of people that had voted for Future Forward were not happy. They were not disgusted with sexual diversity but criticised the lack of respect to the place. Or the abolition of the death penalty, and legal abortion; we still have not had the opportunity to take this up as a topic for discussion within the Party. When you have a diverse group of people in the one Party, there will be difficulties in working, but that is our mission to do conceptual work even among people in the Party itself.

For people outside the Party, how do we make them understand the new political line we have drawn? That we are not dividing them vertically into yellow-red like before, but we are dividing them transversally, horizontally. Our important question is to stop the division of sides into yellow-red like before. I have never thought that we have to dissolve the yellow-red shirts. People like to make the criticism that orange is yellow and red mixed together, right? I always assure everyone that it’s not. We thought that orange was modern, and bright. And we’ve also never said we should abandon passing a wholesale amnesty. Many made the criticism, have you forgotten about the dead? Are you stepping on the corpses of the red shirts? I assure you no. But our purpose is to invite you out of the illusion, that there’s only our side who are democratic or there’s only us who monitor corruption. These issues cannot be crudely separated by shirt colours.

I personally believe that politics is doing conceptual work, it is to find more comrades. If you draw a line like this then it stays like this.  Gen Prayut will smile.  That is why, we have to find some sort of power that can pull people into joining in.

Nowadays, how have you planned to make the Party into an institution?

We have to work with consistent ideas. Since Thanathorn grew up in the industrial business sector, he has always believed in the potential of people. I have argued with him on this many times. He said we have to trust people. We give them the work and just let them do it.  Don’t think so much, it’s a waste of time, just do it. But I often view things in the dimension of establishing a political party in a country with crazy rules everywhere. That forces us to be careful about being attacked on this, on that. When we think about pushing forward the potential of our people in various fields, we always feel worried whether it will be a danger to the Party. Will we get attacked?

Actually, the limitation inside is connected to the outside as well. The legal system, political parties and independent organisations that surround us are always ready to stab us. If Future Forward was founded in a country that is more open than this, I think we could do a lot more things and a lot faster than this.

Right now, both Thanathorn and you, Piyabutr, are being attacked with all sorts of things. If Future Forward no longer has Thanathorn and Piyabutr, what would it be like?