Setting the bar even higher
Driving up poll goals is the name of the game for many political parties competing in general elections.
And if there is a party accused of setting a very ambitious poll target, the main opposition Pheu Thai Party would definitely take the biscuit, according to observers.
What many opinion polls have in common is that they consistently have Pheu Thai as the clear favourite to win most House seats in the next poll scheduled for May 14. But how many seats Pheu Thai will walk away with is anyone’s guess.
Pheu Thai was one of the first parties to hit the pre-election campaign trail. The party came across as being well-prepared for the poll.
A source said the party has also carried out its own survey to gauge its pre-election campaign performance and assess whether its ultimate goal of a landslide win remains tenable.
However, critics doubt the validity of such internal surveys. They were conducted either by their own members working on the ground or local pollsters commissioned to do the job. Many times, findings from these “opinion polls” were not professionally compiled and failed to meet polling standards, marring their credibility.
The critics have joked that if the House seats the individual parties projected they would win were to be added together, the number could run into thousands, as opposed to the 500 seats that are really up for grabs.
From the outset, Pheu Thai believed it could work its magic by attracting voters from red-shirt groups, like it did in previous elections, and win the next poll outright by sweeping most constituencies and collecting enough seats to form the next government solo.
However, its falling out with several redshirt factions in some provinces has threatened to dent Pheu Thai’s popularity. Many red-shirt members complained they were mistreated by the party after their leaders failed to make the cut as Pheu Thai election candidates and switched to other parties
including the Bhumjaithai Party, thought to be Pheu Thai’s most dangerous opponent in the election.
Despite expecting an intensified struggle in the lead-up to the poll, Pheu Thai has never been modest about its House seats target. Late last year, it announced it was aiming for at least 250 seats, half of the available number in the House of Representatives.
However, that figure has kept going up since, to 270 and most recently, to 310.
Jatuporn Prompan, chairman of the redshirt United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) and now one of Pheu Thai’s most vocal critics, said the party’s seat target has continued to rise to the point where it risks becoming a runaway number.
Reading between the lines, the former protest leader said the number, that opponents call a gross exaggeration, should be a possible, subtle warning to other opposition parties. Pheu Thai is zeroing in on establishing a single-party government, which implies it is not very interested in inviting other parties to form a coalition.
Regardless of how friendly the current opposition parties are with each other, there are no friends in elections and Pheu Thai’s gain would be a fellow opposition party’s loss, Mr Jatuporn said, apparently referring to Move Forward, the second-largest party in the opposition bloc.
Mr Jatuporn said in practice, voters rarely choose a party outside of their preferred bloc. For example, traditional supporters of Pheu Thai would tend to, if they decided to vote for another party, cast their ballots for a party aligned to or share Pheu Thai’s political stance.
That said, swing votes would more often than not be an “intra-bloc” occurrence, which means parties in the alliance would be making inroads into one another’s pool of supporters, according to Mr Jatuporn.
He said Pheu Thai is not shy to declare at campaign rallies that there are no “brother or sister” parties in an election race.
Mr Jatuporn, on his political talk show Prathet Thai Tong Ma Gorn (Thailand Must Come First) last week, expressed curiosity as to how Pheu Thai arrived at its 310-seat target.
For a party to revise up its target so steeply within a short span of time, there must have been a spectacularly encouraging turn of events that tipped the scales of public sentiment in favour of the party, which would give it a tremendous lift at the poll.
However, according to Mr Jatuporn, such a twist has been non-existent so far for Pheu Thai.
“Who knows, it [Pheu Thai’s House seat target] might be jacked up to 400 tomorrow,” Mr Jatuporn said sarcastically.