This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum, held in association with The New York Times, where experts gathered in the Greek capital last week to discuss global issues.
Pita Limjaroenrat would have become Thailand’s prime minister at age 42 had his country been a parliamentary democracy such as Britain.
Mr. Pita led his Move Forward party to a surprise first-place finish in the May 2023 elections after campaigning to upend the status quo. His platform included legalizing same-sex marriage, setting a $13 minimum wage and slashing the army’s budget. Having won the backing of more than 14 million voters, he declared, “A new day for the people has arrived,” and formed an eight-party coalition that would allow him to govern. Yet under Thailand’s constitutional system, Move Forward failed to get enough support in the military-backed Senate to take power. By August 2024, the party had been disbanded, and Mr. Pita had been banned from politics for 10 years.
Today, Mr. Pita is back on a campus he knows well: Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where he completed a Master in Public Administration in 2011. This time he is teaching. He was a speaker last week at the Athens Democracy Forum, an annual gathering of policymakers, business leaders, academics and activists held in association with The New York Times. In a video interview before the forum, he discussed the future of democracy in Thailand, and how he is grooming his students to run for office in their own developing nations. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
You came very close to becoming Thailand’s prime minister three years ago. How do you feel, looking back on things today?
I’m very worried, because this could happen again in the future. Thailand is a competitive autocracy, where autocrats allow you to have elections once in a while. But they can always overturn the people’s choice in various ways.
Until two decades ago, autocrats were not very smart. They had to put tanks on the street, have warfare and violence on the street to seize power. In the last two decades, they have become much smarter, and mastered discreet ways of suspending people, banning politicians, dissolving political parties. So there’s no need for them to put tanks on the street.
In Thailand, we’ve been democratic for about 100 years. And yet we have had 13 military coups in that time. Every seven years [on average], a military coup will intervene and pause democracy.
Thailand is a country that is punching below its weight. We are the second-largest country in ASEAN [Association of South East Asian Nations]. Yet we’re among the slowest growing.
Are you living between the U.S. and Thailand at the moment?
I spend most of my time in Boston now, at the Harvard Kennedy School, where it all began. I’ve come full circle: from turning textbooks into reality, I have gone to turning reality into textbooks. I teach how to run for public office in developing countries.
What would be an ideal future in Thailand from your perspective?
I want to be able to compete in a free and fair election once again, and win again, with the support of the majority of the people — including the younger generation.
The platform we ran on in 2023 was a 3-D platform: It called for a demilitarized, demonopolized and decentralized Thailand. We campaigned for a country with no more coups, a country where the big conglomerates don’t have power over markets, and a country where Bangkok is not Thailand, and Thailand is not Bangkok.
What are you doing at Harvard?
I am grooming next-generation leaders, and spending time with young people from ASEAN countries. They’re 18, 19 or 20, and I have office hours for whoever wants to run for public office.
That’s the power bank that keeps me energized. We have a younger generation emerging, and new voters at every election cycle.
Can you be more specific about what you teach at Harvard, and what feedback the students give?
The class is called “How to run for public office in developing countries” — becoming a politician. I took the class when I was a student at the Kennedy School, and the man who taught it was Steve Jarding, a campaign manager for Bill Clinton. I used it to run for office in Thailand in 2023.
What did Steve Jarding teach you?
How to run for public office and articulate why you want to run in the first place. You learned the whole upstream, midstream, and downstream of running for office: what your campaign structure is, how you do route management, how you knock on doors, how you fund-raise. We practiced organizing campaign rallies, delivering stump speeches.
Today, I’m returning to teach based on the reality in developing countries. This is democracy in hard places. It’s not American-style democracy.
How have you adapted what you learned at Harvard two decades ago, and what are you bringing to the table that’s different?
The framework is quite similar, but it has obviously been updated because of technology and social media: fake news, deepfakes and misinformation — as well as the use of artificial intelligence in campaigns, slogan design, or fund-raising.
So you teach students about the ugly side of technology — fake news, deepfakes, misinformation — but also its positive side?
Yes. Artificial intelligence can be used in slogan design, fund-raising plans, route optimization: how you spend the day and meet as many people as you can. It can be used in segmentation, in running data-driven campaigns, in precision politics. For example, you separate people into red, yellow, and green groups. If it’s green, they meet me one time. If it’s red, I don’t show up. If it’s yellow, they meet me three times.
Who are your students, and what’s their reaction to what you teach?
They’re from countries such as Colombia, Chile, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. And there’s a verbal MOU whereby they promise me that they will run for office after graduation — within five years.
I grill them: Do you know what office you want to run for? Do you want to be a mayor, a governor or a member of parliament? If they show up not knowing what they want to do, then I give more attention to the students who have a concrete plan and a very concrete idea.
So far, so good. I think they have a good, solid plan crafted for them for free, so that when they finish working for Boston Consulting Group or J.P. Morgan or the like, and they finally have enough money to run, then they have this plan that they can go forward with. I’m trying to inject fresh blood into the system all around the world — as much as I can.
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