Today’s public holiday in Thailand is Constitution Day. It commemorates the charters that have been written because the 1932 Siamese Revolution when Thailand ended 800 years of absolute monarchy and transitioned to a constitutional monarchy. Since then there have been 20 completely different charters with the latest was drafted by the navy junta, the National Council for Peace and Order, and adopted in 2017. But over the past 12 months, there have been requires monarchy reform and a rewrite of the Constitution.
Here’s the occasions that led up to Thailand’s first Constitution…
The Thai people refer to their nation as “Mueang Thai” (land of the free) however foreigners have been traditionally accustomed to call Thailand “Siam”. Save of the monarch can be a tradition in Thailand that goes back centuries. The earliest Thai kingdoms of notice have been the Kingdom of Sukhothai, based in 1238 AD, and the later Kingdom referred to as “Ayutthaya,” which lasted from the 1300’s till it was razed by the Burmese in 1767 (something the Thais have NEVER forgotten).
But fashionable Thailand started with the Chakri Dynasty in 1782 with a capital on the swampy banks of the Chao Phraya River. The first king was Rama I. King Maha Vachiralongkorn is Rama X, the tenth Thai King of the Chakri Dynasty, who ascended the Thai throne in a lavish coronation in May 2019.
During the 1920s, Thailand was going through economic and political upheaval, very comparable to the relaxation of the world. Then in 1932 the Army, police, and Bangkok’s ‘elite’ approached the King Prajadhipok Rama VII to demand he cede a few of his powers. The King, 39 years of age at the time, refused, however on December 10, 1932, he accepted his destiny to serve as a monarch together with his powers tremendously lowered. But his place as Thailand’s King was protected within the new constitution and all constitutions to comply with.
Following a cold coup, the structure of 1932, in addition to later constitutions, theoretically limited the power of the Thai monarch and positioned the facility in the hands of the people’s elected representatives in government.
Since December 10, 1932, there have been 20 constitutions (or charters) written for Thailand.
The monarchy has endured via every of the rewrites. But it was through the reign of the Rama 9, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, ruling from 1946 to 2016, that put an enduring stamp on the Thai monarchy, and clawing back a few of the excessive regard the Thai monarch lost within the years earlier than the 1932 Siamese Revolution.
During King Bhumibol’s reign the palace, occasionally, stepped throughout the gray line into the muddy swamp of Thai politics. It was also throughout his reign that the practice of prostrating in front of the King was re-introduced, abolished again in 1868 by Rama V, King Chulalongkorn. During King Bhumibol’s reign the Palace ran an effective appeal offensive to reinvigorate Thailand’s enthusiasm for their monarch and followed the personable King in his travels and captured his work together with his subjects in pictures and protection in Thai media.
The current monarch Rama X has quietly wrested back a few of the powers of Thailand’s King in a series of edicts that transferred the wealth of the Palace coffers into his title and took over direct management of two battalions of the Thai Army.
A brass plaque, commemorating the Siamese Revolution of 1932 in Sanam Luang, the public space and parade grounds for the Grand Palace subsequent door, was mysteriously removed in 2017 and replaced with one bearing “royalist” inscriptions. An try to re-install a copy of the original plaque in September 2020 by members of the Free Youth movement – the student-led anti-government protest movement – was additionally removed in the night after it was put in..