With nearly all precincts reporting as of Monday morning, the Election Commission's preliminary results show the conservative, pro-establishment party winning 193 seats in the 500-member House of Representatives.

That's well ahead of the projected 116 seats secured by its nearest rival, the reformist, youth-backed People's Party.

Pheu Thai, the party of Thailand's once dominant Shinawatra clan, is poised to finish third with 76 seats.

Days, if not weeks, of negotiations between Bhumjaithai and potential coalition partners, aimed at giving the next government a majority of seats, are expected to follow before the Election Commission confirms the results and Thailand's king swears the prime minister and Cabinet in.

Political analyst Punchada Sirivunnabood ascribed Bhumjaithai's stronger-than-expected performance to its skill at harnessing the nationalist fervor whipped up by Thailand's border dispute with Cambodia.

The Southeast Asian neighbors' competing territorial claims — which date back decades — flared up into armed clashes last year, displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians and leaving dozens of soldiers dead on both sides.

Only three months after taking power, incumbent Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, the Bhumjaithai leader, triggered the elections by dissolving parliament in December, with public support for his hawkish approach to the dispute at its peak.

"Bhumjaithai used that … to boost [its] support during the campaign," said Punchada, a professor and dean of social sciences at Thailand's Mahidol University.

She said many voters were likely impressed by the people the party chose to head key ministries, including commerce and finance, after assuming power in September.

They helped Bhumjaithai tap into voters' desire for swifter economic growth, which has hovered at about a sluggish 2% since pandemic restrictions ended while neighboring peer economies have raced ahead.

Bhumjaithai's picks for key ministries did help to rebrand it as a party of technocrats, agreed Duncan McCargo, an associate senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

But he attributed the party's success Sunday more to repeating the playbook former Prime Minister and Pheu Thai patriarch Thaksin Shinawatra used to sweep to power in the early 2000s.

Back then, McCargo said, Thaksin convinced politicians across the country — often from family clans, or so-called baan yai, with established canvassing and patronage networks in their provinces — to switch over from other parties.

"So, that's what they did this time," McCargo said of Bhumjaithai. "They acquired a whole bunch of bankable, electable political candidates who've either been MPs before or had prominent positions in local government before, and supported those people very strategically with very considerable funding to try and give them the best possible chance of winning."

Several lawmakers of other parties, including Pheu Thai, had defected to Bhumjaithai in the leadup to the polls.

But just as Bhumjaithai outperformed expectations, the People's Party did worse.

Opinion polls ahead of the elections put the People's Party either neck and neck or ahead of Bhumjaithai.

In addition to finishing well behind Bhumjaithai, though, the 116 seats the People's Party is projected to win is far short of the 151 it won in 2023 in its previous incarnation as the Move Forward party.

McCargo said the party in 2023 could draw a stark contrast between its message of loosening the military's grip on politics and that of then-incumbent Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, the general who led the military coup that toppled a democratically-elected government in 2014.

"Whereas this time there wasn't that clear-cut distinction for the People's Party to play on," he said. "The messages have become a lot more blurred. What exactly it was that they were trying to stand up against was not so obvious, because we had a clear quasi-ideological difference in the last elections, and that difference seemed a lot more muted this time."

Punchada said some People's Party supporters were also disillusioned by its decision to back Anutin's bid for prime minister in parliament in September following the collapse of the previous government, and by the recent arrests of two of its candidates, one for alleged money laundering and the other for suspected links to an illegal online gambling operation.

With the general election over, Bhumjaithai will now turn to building a coalition big enough to command the 250 seats it needs to win a vote in the House of Representatives to reelect Anutin as prime minister.

At a press conference declaring victory for Bhumjaithai Sunday evening, Anutin declined to name the party's likely partners.

But the analysts said the strongest contender is Klatham, a similarly conservative party whose projected seats would give Anutin enough MPs to secure the premiership.

Ideological differences are expected to keep Bhumjaithai and the People's Party apart, leaving the reformists in opposition. Bhumjaithai also has a bitter political history with Pheu Thai. But if the two can patch things up, Punchada said, Pheu Thai's addition to the coalition would make the next government much more stable than those of the recent past.

Thailand has had three governments in as many years.

Voters were also asked Sunday whether or not the government should start drafting amendments to the constitution that Prayuth's military regime rammed through in 2017. They look to have endorsed the measure by roughly two to one.

Those pushing for amendments, the People's Party among them, say the constitution gives too much power to ostensibly independent bodies such as the Election Commission and the Constitutional Court to upend the will of the people.

Critics of those institutions accuse them of playing key roles over the past two decades in thwarting a number of parties and governments perceived as posing a threat to the conservative, pro-military and monarchist establishment's ultimate grip on power.

But with a conservative, Bhumjaithai-led government in charge of ushering the amendment process along, any further efforts to change the constitution are likely to stall, said Siripan Nogsuan Sawasdee, a political science professor at Thailand's Chulalongkorn University.

"I think Bhumjaithai has no intention to amend the constitution, so they will delay the process as much as they can," she said.

Any drafted amendments would still need to be approved in two more referenda, and possibly by at least a third of the parliament's upper house, or the Senate.

Officially, senators have no party affiliation. But Bhumjaithai has been accused of rigging last year's Senate elections to have some of its preferred candidates win, which it denies.

Siripan said that makes it unlikely that any amendments challenging the very establishment backing Bhumjaithai will make it through to the end.

"So, I don't have much hope for amending the constitution at this moment," she said.

Edited by: Srinivas Mazumdaru