A reformist Thai politician, whose party was the biggest in the most recent Thai election, held in May, has failed to clear a major hurdle to be elected Prime Minister.
Pita Limjaroenrat is the leader of the Move Forward Party, which won 151 of the seats in the 500-member Thai House of Representatives, making them the single-biggest party.
Move Forward formed a coalition with five other parties, giving the new alliance a majority of over 300 seats.
However, to become Prime Minister Pita needs to win a majority of a joint vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, which has 249 members. This means that Pita would need to win 375 votes of 749, in the joint chamber.
Following a coup in 2014 the military government forced through a new constitution which allowed it to appoint all the members of the Senate.
On Thursday Pita received 324 votes, and only 13 coming from the Senate, with most of the Senators appointed by the military opposing the reformist Pita.
Pita is also facing a number of other hurdles. One of these is a complaint made against him to the Constitutional Court which claims that Pita’s goal of reforming Thailand’s notoriously harsh lese majeste laws poses a threat to the entire Thai political order.
Another vote to elect the Prime Minister will be held next week but it is unclear how this deadlock will be broken.
Image: Sirakorn Lamyai, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons