2025: The year Thailand shook to its core

How much can one nation endure in a single year? In 2025, Thailand found the answer as the pillars of faith, law, and land shattered under the weight of a perfect storm.

Shaky foundations

The ground is shaking, and we Thais know well that it isn’t just one pillar failing—it is the entire structure of our society. Looking back, the trouble began when a 7.7-magnitude earthquake, the strongest to hit the region in over a century, rocked Bangkok.

While the physical tremors eventually subsided, they exposed deep ‘fractures’ in the nation’s integrity.

The collapse of the State Audit Office building did more than claim lives; it sparked investigations that unmasked a downward spiral of construction graft and ignored safety standards.

The Thai public watched as the wreckage revealed the truth: our tax money had vanished into thin air, and our tourism reputation had been traded for cheap, dangerous shortcuts. Watching the footage, a lot of tourists assumed that staying in Thailand could be risky.

Shaky morals

As the nation struggled to rebuild, the moral fabric of the country began to unravel. Two massive religious scandals rocked public trust.

It began mid-year with monastic scandals involving over a dozen senior monks in high-profile sex and extortion cases involving one female! It was a dark chapter in the history of the Sangha, but it was merely the first ‘can of worms’ to be opened.

In August, the arrest of Luang Phor Alongkot of Wat Phra Bat Namphu sent shockwaves through the Buddhist community. For a man once revered as a hero for AIDS patients to be accused of embezzling billions in charity donations—and allegedly stealing a deceased friend’s identity—felt like a betrayal of the soul.

For many, the sacred act of making merit will never feel the same again.

A shaky legal system

There has been no month of rest for the Kingdom. By October, the crisis shifted from the temples to the police stations. A massive bribery probe implicated over 200 officers, including the former National Police Chief.

Allegations of millions in kickbacks from the BNK Master online gambling network painted a picture of a law enforcement system in total disarray.

Much like the monastic scandals, this was a systemic collapse—a house of cards where the highest-ranking officials controlled a fortune beyond imagination.

Shaky disaster management

The year reached a breaking point in December as the “Great Southern Flood” submerged Hat Yai and displaced millions.

This was no unprecedented act of nature; the disaster was amplified by leadership failures, unregulated urban expansion, and dangerously unreliable public communications.

The 2025 floods exposed a systemic fragility at both local and national levels, proving that our safety is often secondary to mismanagement.

Shaky relations with neighbors

A fierce border conflict with Cambodia also erupted this year, intensifying in the final quarter. Thailand’s borders became battlefields as fighter jets and artillery fire turned the frontier into a war zone.

With over 100 lives lost and half a million people displaced, it became the bloodiest standoff in decades, surpassing the 2011 Preah Vihear clashes in both scale and tragedy.

Shaky politics

Of all the storms Thailand faced in 2025, our political instability was the least shocking. In just two years, the nation has seen three Prime Ministers—two of them in 2025 alone.

We essentially changed horses midstream when Anutin Charnvirakul replaced Paetongtarn Shinawatra in September, right as the Thai-Cambodian border conflict ignited.

Though Anutin took office vowing to wait until January to dissolve the House, the instability of his government and the pressure of a looming censure debate forced his hand.

On December 12, he dissolved the lower house, shifting the nation’s focus to the high-stakes election ahead.

A shaky year ahead?

As 2025 closes, a fragile ceasefire with Cambodia offers a moment of peace, but not a solution.

Thailand now looks toward February 8, 2026, as a day of reckoning. In a much-anticipated move, the Election Commission will consolidate the general election with a constitutional referendum, allowing Thais to vote for a new government and a new supreme law on a single day.

This is our chance to pull the country out of its downward spiral. However, an election is just a coat of paint on a crumbling wall.

The evidence of 2025 shows that our country is on the brink of collapsing exactly like the State Audit Office building—from the inside out.

Greed breeds corruption, and corruption feeds an unholy alliance of businessmen, officers, and monks.

The upcoming vote will only be meaningful if we choose to uproot these chronic problems. If we do not fix the foundations now, the next tremor won’t just shake the house—it will bring it down.