Seminar “Thailand’s General Election in 2023: Fundamentals, Dynamics, Outlook”

Seminar

“Thailand’s General Election in 2023: Fundamentals, Dynamics, Outlook”

27 April 2023

1 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.

jointly organized by

German-Southeast Asian Center of Excellence for Public Policy and Good Governance (CPG), Hanns Seidel Foundation (HSS), Bangkok/Laos Office, and Asian Governance Foundation (AGF)

Background

On May 14, Thailand will hold its second general elections after the 2014 military coup and under the 2017 Constitution. The overall situation prior to the elections is complex and for many difficult to discern.

The relative calm of the election campaigns so far seems to contradict the fact that in a society still divided, a transfer of power that would undermine all constitutional safeguards of the established regime is a possible outcome.

At the same time, the polity’s long-established fault lines appear to have blurred to some degree. With most political actors struggling with some handicaps, surprising marriages of convenience seem as much possible as a decisive political landslide victory. While the direct outcome and further consequences of the elections remain uncertain, the tectonic plates of the political system are still shifting.

Against this background, the German Southeast Asian Center of Excellence for Public Policy and Good Governance (CPG) and the Hanns Seidel Foundation Thailand, with support of the Asian Governance Foundation, will convene a seminar on April 27 that seeks to provide participants with an advanced understanding of Thailand’s upcoming elections.

With the aim to explore the state of play shortly before the polls from an impartial point of view, foreign experts will decipher the complexities of the current playing field, its constitutional fundamentals and ultimate fault lines, the political dynamics, the electoral process, and potential post-election scenarios.

Agenda

Speakers:

Henning Glaser

is the Founding Director of the German-Southeast Asian Center of Excellence for Public Policy and Good Governance (CPG) and a member of the Faculty of Law of Thammasat University, where he teaches, inter alia, constitutional law. He also is the Editor-in-Chief of CPG’s Asia in Review (AiR) and the chairman of the board of directors and executive director of the Asian Governance Foundation (AGF).

Henning Glaser is registered as an attorney-at-law in Germany and qualified as a mediator both under German law and the International Mediation Institute. He regularly serves as a consultant and has advised a broad range of governmental and non-governmental agencies in Europe, America, and Asia in various fields of law, politics, and governance.

His research areas cover, among others, constitutional law and politics in Asia, global and regional order, international relations, and geopolitics.

Marwaan Macan-Markar

is an experienced journalist with a career spanning nearly 30 years and over 15 countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Currently, he is based in Thailand and Sri Lanka, working as the Asia Regional Correspondent for Nikkei Asia, a publication of Japan’s oldest and largest financial news organization. His reporting areas as a foreign correspondent include mainland Southeast Asia and lower South Asia.

He started his journalism career in Sri Lanka, reporting on the ethnic conflict for national newspapers such as The Sunday Leader in the 1990s before moving to Mexico to write for Inter Press Service. Throughout his career, he has reported on a wide range of issues, including conflicts, political turmoil, human rights violations, poverty and inequality, economic change, natural disasters, and health pandemics.

Marwaan was also the president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand in 2009 and 2010.

Lucas Meier

is a Senior Program Officer at the German-Southeast Asian Center of Excellence for Public Policy and Good Governance (CPG).

Lucas is a qualified mediator under the International Mediation Institute and serves as deputy head of CPG’s Mediation Center. He also serves as deputy editor-in-chief of CPG’s Asia in Review.

He holds a master’s degree in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, United Kingdom.

Amaël Vier

is a Senior Program Officer for Capacity Building and International Election Observation at the Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL).

A graduate from the Institute of Political Studies of Grenoble and the Faculty of Law of Aix-en-Provence (France), Amaël specializes in the analysis of electoral systems and legal frameworks for elections. Throughout his academic years, he had the opportunity to learn about elections up-close by working for a member of the French Parliament.

He first joined ANFREL as an electoral analyst during the observation mission for the 2017 Cambodian commune elections and has since coordinated election observation efforts in Myanmar, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Taiwan.