Diving Into Thailand's Political Party Donations in 2025
The United Thai Nation Party comes in first place
I’ve already written a short thread on X and Bluesky about this, but as this is one of my own pet interests, for my first original post on The Coffee Parliament I wanted to take some time to take a look at Thai taxpayer donations in 2025.
One unique feature of Thailand’s income tax forms is a section where taxpayers can donate up to 500 baht (~15 USD) of their taxes to any registered political party of their choice. The funds are then distributed by the Thai Political Party Development Fund. I haven’t seen the figures for pure taxpayer donations yet, but the Fund did release figures for the total allocations that were made to 68 political parties this year. (These total allocations also include other figures such as the amount of money each party should be allocated from the fund based on the number of local branches they have throughout the country).
The top three allocations were:
United Thai Nation Party: 17.9 million baht
Pheu Thai Party: 16 million baht
Democrat: 14.9 million baht
You can find the rest of the totals here.
One might find it surprising that the United Thai Nation Party received so much taxpayer support. The party won only 36 out of 500 seats in 2023, and without their spiritual leader former prime minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, the party has found itself lacking in star power. The deputy UTN spokesperson, Rudklao Suwankiri, quickly called posted these numbers on social media — a welcome sign of momentum for a party that politically is rumored to be increasingly divided and beleaguered. Coupled with poll numbers that have been getting better for the party (a topic for another post!), perhaps the party truly is on the rise? But I would caution against making quick takeaways based on just the donation numbers.
For one, I would not interpret these numbers necessarily as a sign of momentum. You would certainly want more donations, not less: that much is obvious. But for most of recent history, the champions of taxpayer donations have not been election-winners. Before the 2014 military coup, the Democrats dominated the taxpayer donation charts; in 2011, the Democrats had almost 100,000 individual taxpayers who donated to the party, compared to only a little over 30,000 for Pheu Thai. Of course, the Democrats were trounced in the 2011 general election, when Yingluck Shinawatra won a landslide victory.
I would therefore see the strong UTN numbers as yes, an important sign of life for the party — it retains some support amongst the middle and upper class who are most likely to pay income taxes. They are inheriting and maintaining at least some of the voters who used to donate to the Democrats. Yet recent evidence points to the fact that a sizable portion of that taxpaying base has switched hues from blue to orange. After all, this year we have no real idea of how the progressives did: the Move Forward Party was dissolved last year, while the People’s Party, according to the Fund, is still in the process of changing their bank account and so has not yet received their funding allocation. Move Forward had easily come in first place in 2024, after it received almost 37 million baht just in taxpayer donations alone. Even in just this market— middle and upper class Thai taxpayers — the UTN faces stiff competition.
What is most worth remembering is how some of Thailand’s most influential parties barely register in these allocations, while tiny parties receive outsized support. Thai Pakdee, the ultra-conservative political party which showed itself to be a niche option by winning no seats in 2023, received 5.6 million baht — far more than Bhumjaithai, the second biggest party in the government coalition, which received only 1.9 million baht. But it is facts like these that remind us that it is the noisiest and most visible parties with only small core of highly loyal voters that prove themselves to be electoral juggernauts in Thai politics. Instead, the highly efficient political machines that continue to dominate their local strongholds, out of sight from more affluent taxpayers they may be, continue to wield some of the most electoral influence.
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