Thai court to decide on case seeking Pita’s disqualification – Al Jazeera English

Move comes a day before the parliament votes on Pita Limjaroenrat’s bid to become the next prime minister of Thailand.

Thailand’s election commission has asked the country’s Constitutional Court to rule on whether the leader of the progressive party that won the most seats in a recent vote should be disqualified from parliament, according to media reports.

The referral of the case against Pita Limjaroenrat, who heads the Move Forward Party, came on Wednesday, a day before the bicameral parliament is scheduled to vote on the 42-year-old businessman’s bid to become the next prime minister of Thailand.

Pita has the backing of eight parties in an alliance seeking to form a new government.

But he has faced a number of challenges, and last month the election commission set up a special committee to investigate whether he was qualified to run for office.

“The Election Commission has considered the issue… and perceives that the status of Pita Limcharoenrat is considered to be voided, according to the Thai Constitution”, the poll body said in a statement, adding that it had concluded its probe.

It confirmed they will submit their findings to the Constitutional Court for “further consideration”.

The commission has been looking into whether Pita was knowingly unfit to register as a parliamentary candidate because of his ownership of shares in a media firm, which is prohibited under election rules.

Pita has downplayed the issue, arguing the shares in the firm, iTV, have since been transferred and the company was not an active media organisation. He faces disqualification, up to 10 years in jail and a 20-year ban from politics if found to have broken the rules.

It is unclear when the Constitutional Court may rule on the case, although it was due to meet later on Wednesday.

Under Thailand’s rules, even if Pita is suspended as an member of parliament, he is still eligible to run for prime minister.

Move Forward, in a statement, accused the election commission of rushing its referral of the case and said Pita should have been given a chance to respond to and refute the allegations.

“The decision to submit a case to the court saying there was enough evidence, without informing him of any charges and not allowing him a chance to explain as under the regulations set by the [election commission]… is an abuse of power under the criminal code,” the party said in a statement.

Move Forward’s predecessor party, Future Forward, was also hit with a similar legal case in 2019, when the Constitutional Court disqualified billionaire leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit as a member of parliament.

The decision pushed tens of thousands of young demonstrators into the streets.

In the May 14 election, Move Forward won huge support among the youth and the capital Bangkok with a platform of institutional change, including reducing the army’s political role, undoing monopolies and reviewing a controversial law against insulting the monarchy.

It won 151 of the 500 seats up for grabs, while another opposition party, Pheu Thai, won 141.

Their stunning victory was widely seen as an overwhelming rejection of nine years of government led or backed by army after its 2014 coup.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak, professor of international relations at the Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, called the election commission’s move against Pita “an old trick to subvert the political will”.

“The system is rigged because the election commission is working with the Constitutional Court to stymie Pita’s premiership systematically,” he told Al Jazeera. “These are agencies that are supposed to be impartial referees of the election and government formation, but we have seen that they are agents of the military-backed regime that appointed them in the first place.”

Thitinan predicted mass protests if Pita’s leadership bid were to be thwarted.

“The conservative forces will not get away so easily this time,” he said.