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Enough Senate support for top job

Thai PM front runner claims after his party won the most seats at last month’s election
AFP, Bangkok
The front runner to become Thailand’s next prime minister, Pita Limjaroenrat, said yesterday he had secured enough support from the Senate to take the top job.
Pita’s progressive Move Forward Party (MFP) won the most seats at last month’s election as voters delivered a crushing rejection of military-linked parties that have run the kingdom for nearly a decade.
To become PM, Pita has to muster a majority across both houses, including the Senate, whose 250 members were handpicked by the last junta.
His eight-party coalition has a total of 312 seats in the lower house, but needs another 64 -- from either house -- for a majority.
Asked yesterday how many senators would endorse him, Pita told reporters at the parliament building: “Enough to make me become PM.”
Thailand’s parliament is set to sit next Monday for the first time since the election and a vote on the prime minister is due in mid-July.
MFP’s determination to amend Thailand’s tough laws against insulting the royal family has spooked the royalist-military conservative establishment.
Pita dismissed speculation that his party’s stance on reforming royal defamation laws could be a barrier to forming a government.
Several senators have already said they will not vote for him as prime minister.
Earlier this month the election commission set up an investigation to look at whether Pita was qualified to run for office, because of his alleged ownership of shares in a now-defunct media company.
Legislators are not allowed to own media shares.
MFP and fellow opposition outfit Pheu Thai dominated the May 14 election, in which voters roundly rejected Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha, a former army chief who came to power in a 2014 coup.
The coalition has announced ambitious plans to rewrite the constitution -- scripted by Prayut’s junta in 2017 -- as well as ending military conscription and allowing same-sex marriage.
The country’s election commission last Monday certified the winners of all 500 seats of the lower house which must convene within early July to elect a speaker and two deputies. The speaker will then call for a joint session of parliament between the elected lower house and the appointed senate to vote on a new prime minister.
The alliance has control of 321 seats, still short of the 376 needed in the vote for the next premier. To elect Pita prime minister the alliance will have to must a majority of the 500 seats in the lower house and the 250 seats in the senate. The senators were appointed under military rule after a 2014 coup.
The Move Forward Party won the election on an anti-establishment platform that has put it on a collision course with conservatives royalist generals and old-money business elite that have long controlled Thai politics.