Your Monday Briefing: Thailand Votes for Change

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Thai voters overwhelmingly sought to end nearly a decade of military rule, casting ballots for two opposition parties that promised to reduce the power of two powerful conservative institutions: the military and the monarchy.

With 97 percent of the votes counted as of this morning, the progressive Move Forward Party is neck and neck with the populist Pheu Thai Party. Move Forward has won 151 seats and Pheu Thai 141 in the 500-seat DPR.

“We can make this election a referendum on the traditional center of power in Thai politics,” said Napon Jatusripitak, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute. “People want change, and not just a change of government. They want structural reform.

Clearly, the result was a humiliating blow to Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, who took over in a coup in 2014.

Advanced: The party is targeting compulsory military service and is seeking to change laws that criticize the royal family. It has made a surprising move, taking young urban voters, and voters in the capital city of Bangkok.

Pheu Thai: The party was founded by former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who is still remembered as a champion of the poor after being ousted in a coup in 2006 amid allegations of corruption. Thaksin’s daughter is the top choice for prime minister, according to opinion polls.

What’s next: As Pheu Thai and Move Forward did not have enough seats to form a majority, they had to negotiate with other parties to form a coalition. But under the rules of the Thai system, written by the military after the coup, the junta will still be the king. The decision on who will lead could take weeks or even months.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faces his fiercest political challenge in his 20 years in power as Turkish voters head to the polls yesterday. The results could reshape Turkey’s domestic and foreign policies.

Results are still coming in, but the state news agency said preliminary results showed Erdogan ahead. Opposition leaders rejected the figure, and Erdogan’s top challenger, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, wrote on Twitter, “We are leading.”

If no candidate gets a majority, the two runners-up will qualify on May 28. Follow live coverage.

Background: The election is, in many ways, a referendum on Erdogan’s two decades as Turkey’s dominant politician. He faces a very tight race, mainly due to anger over the state of the economy, which has suffered from painful inflation since 2018.

The vote also came three months after an earthquake killed more than 50,000 people in Turkey, raising the question of whether Erdogan’s emphasis on the construction of unsafe buildings.

Election Integrity: Turkey is neither a full democracy nor a full autocracy, and Erdogan has tilted the political playing field over the past two decades.

War in Ukraine: A defeat for Erdogan would be a boon for the West and a loss for Russia. Erdogan is increasing trade with Moscow, seeking closer ties with President Vladimir Putin and blocking NATO expansion.

The storm forecast to be the strongest to hit Myanmar in more than a decade made landfall near the Bangladesh border yesterday. The storm, Cyclone Mocha, has killed at least six people, but preliminary reports indicate that it has so far not caused the humanitarian disaster that authorities feared.

The typhoon-hit region, in western Myanmar, is home to some of the world’s poorest people. The storm passed through Cox’s Bazar, a city in Bangladesh that is home to the world’s largest refugee camp, although officials said they had not received reports of damage there.

The World Food Program says it is preparing for a large-scale emergency response. But some officials expressed cautious hope that the region would be spared the worst of the damage as the storm weakens.

Many Asian American women are named after Connie Chung, a veteran US television journalist. Author Connie Wang explores this phenomenon, which she calls “Connie’s Generation.”

“We all have our own stories about how our families came to the United States, and why they chose the names they did,” she wrote. “But we’re also part of a bigger story: about the patterns formed by specific immigration policies, and the ripple effect of asking women on TV to just be there, doing their job.”

For centuries in India, the brand of witches was fueled by superstition. A crop will fail, the well will dry up, or a family member will get sick, and the villagers will find someone – almost always a woman – to blame for the misfortune that they do not know.

Many Indian states have passed laws to eradicate witch hunting, but the practice persists in some states. From 2010 to 2021, more than 1,500 people died after accusations of witchcraft, according to government data.

One country has tried to stop the practice by deploying a “campaign team to prevent witch-hunting”, which is a street action to raise awareness. But enforcement of anti-witch-hunt laws may be weak, and entrenched beliefs are hard to change, activists say.

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