“I want to create bargaining power for the people,” Sondhi Limthongkul said. “No matter who comes after Anutin, they will have to face us. It’s people’s power.”
Sondhi is 78. In 2008 his yellow-shirt protesters shut Bangkok’s two airports, and now he is trying to start another movement against Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul. He calls it “Take Back Thailand”, and he calls it his “last mission”.
A campaign with many targets
He announced the campaign formally at a press conference at Baan Phra Athit on Monday, September 7, 2026, The Nation reported. There was no street march. He told reporters he did not want to bring the government down but did want to “make life uncomfortable for it”. Authorities, he said, should act against what he called illegal “grey” businesses run through Thai nominees, and he said sustained pressure could make Anutin “stop singing and dancing” and act.
The list of grievances is long: living costs, corruption, alleged political interference and foreign criminal networks, according to Bloomberg’s interview with him, carried by The Straits Times. He has also criticised faster approvals for data centre projects and delays in compensation for flood victims in Hat Yai. The week before the Straits Times piece, he led hundreds of activists to Israel’s embassy in Bangkok to demand action over Israeli visitors he accused of disregarding Thai laws and customs. Anutin had already dismissed the premise: “Thailand belongs to all Thai people, so there is no need to take it back.”
Asked on September 12, Anutin said the movement could hurt the Thai people more than the government. “Does Sondhi want to make people unhappy?” he said.
Without the old allies
Sondhi built a publishing empire in the 1990s boom, only for the 1997 financial crisis to batter it. He helped lead the royalist People’s Alliance for Democracy, which mobilised against Thaksin Shinawatra. In 2008, its protesters occupied Suvarnabhumi airport and shut it for about a week, stranding about 3,000 travellers.
This time the conservative establishment that once backed him is largely aligned with or sympathetic to Anutin and his Bhumjaithai Party. “This government is worse,” Sondhi said. “Thaksin only interfered, but Anutin dominates political institutions.” He no longer wants the ultra-conservative label, and he describes the opposition People’s Party as, in principle, “quite OK”.
He has reach online. His Facebook following exceeds five million and his Sondhi Talk YouTube channel has about 2.5 million subscribers. He says the programme draws about 100 million views a month, and 171 million in August. Turning viewers into protesters is harder than it was with television audiences two decades ago, he concedes.
Yuttaporn Issarachai, a lecturer at Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University, warned that a movement about everything lacks focus, unlike the old one that had a single target in Thaksin. He said a worse economy a year from now could change that. Sondhi plans to tour several provinces ahead of a Constitutional Court ruling on September 28 that could invalidate the February election result.
Sources
- Thai protest leader Sondhi Limthongkul launches 'Take Back Thailand' campaign | The Straits Times
- Sondhi launches campaign to pressure Anutin government
