Chadchart Sittipunt, the governor of Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, has won re-election after the city’s residents overwhelmingly backed him for a second term in an election yesterday.
According to vote counts reported by Thai PBS, Chadchart won 1.44 million votes or 68 percent of the vote, with 95 percent of the votes counted. This put him well ahead of his main rivals, independent Mallika Boonmeetrakul Mahasuk (288,000 votes, or 13 percent of the total), Chaiwat Sathawornwichit of the People’s Party (177,000 votes), and Democrat candidate Anucha Burapachaisri (102,000 votes).
As the Bangkok Post reported, Chadchart’s total set a new record for a winning Bangkok governor candidate, surpassing his own record of 1.39 million votes, set during his initial election in 2022. Just short of half of the 4.4 million eligible voters turned out to cast a ballot yesterday.
Chadchart, an engineer and former transport minister in the Pheu Thai party-led government that was ousted by a military coup in 2014, will now return to the governorship for another four years, pending official confirmation by the Election Commission.
Following his victory, the 60-year-old said that it was time to “work, work, work.”
“The goal of work in the next four years is not the publication of achievements but success in proving to people that their lives will be noticeably better,” he said, as per the Bangkok Post.
Bangkok – a far-flung megacity of between 5 and 11 million people, depending on how you count it – is the only province in Thailand where the governor is elected rather than appointed by the Ministry of Interior. This arrangement has been in place since 1975, when the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) was formed and the rapidly expanding city became a special administrative entity run by an elected governor with a four-year term.
Chadchart’s re-election was widely predicted; indeed, its seeming inevitability may explain the relatively low voter turnout.
Past governors have often been blamed for Bangkok’s various problems, which include traffic, flooding, and the worsening smog problem, and Chadchart’s ability to maintain his high levels of popularity, especially given the BMA’s limited powers, is no small achievement.
One public opinion poll conducted last year found that 48 percent of respondents planned to vote for Chadchart again at the next gubernatorial election. A further 74 percent of respondents said that they were either very satisfied or largely satisfied with his performance.
Since taking office, Chadchart has introduced an AI-enabled app known as Traffy Fondue, which allows residents and visitors to report urban infrastructure issues, such as potholes, garbage, broken streetlights, or flooding, to the appropriate local authorities. As of last month, Traffy Fondue had received more than 1.37 million reports, of which it had claimed to have resolved 77 percent.
Voranai Vanijaka, a prominent political commentator, told South China Morning Post that Chadchart has managed to cultivate an image as a responsive and personable leader among the city’s population – despite the persistence of its various problems.
“What he’s done better than most politicians lies in his relatability,” Voranai told the publication. “Chadchart has made the office more accessible; we can find him anywhere, even running in the park.”
As the Thai political analyst Ken Lohatepanont noted in an article on June 2, Chadchart’s re-election chances were aided by two additional factors. First, he faced a lesser-known field of candidates this year than in 2022, which featured “perhaps the most qualified group of candidates to ever run for Bangkok governor.”
Second is the historical tendency of Bangkok’s voters to “prioritize personality over party” in the gubernatorial election. For instance, in the national election in February, the progressive People’s Party won every parliamentary seat in Bangkok – the first time in Thai history that a party has done so – but failed to gain more than 8 percent of the votes in yesterday’s gubernatorial election. The Democrat Party also failed to make much of a dent in Chadchart’s majority, despite its status as the political home of Bangkok’s large middle-class. As another observer put it recently, all of the pre-election surveys suggested that Bangkok voters “are prioritizing administrative competence over political affiliation.”
The fact that Chadchart has become one of Thailand’s most recognizable political figures, despite operating solo and outside the party system, inevitably raises the question of whether he could make an impact at the national level. So far, he has not expressed any ambitions for higher political office and told reporters yesterday that he had no interest in becoming prime minister.
While one cannot take any politicians’ statement at face value, Chadchart’s apparently single-minded focus on his current duties in Bangkok very likely explains why he continues to enjoy such high levels of public approval.
