It has been an improbable pipe dream for the people of Thailand in recent years but finally, it seems, the country is set to go to the polls.

In just under two months, according to the country’s election commission, Thais will be given the chance to exercise their democratic right for the first time since elections in 2014 were invalidated. The scheduled vote on 24 February follows four years of oppressive and undemocratic rule by a military junta, known as the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), which took power in a bloodless coup in 2014.

Many Thais remain sceptical that the long-awaited election – pushed back multiple times by the military junta on the dubious pretext that the country was not ready – will even happen, let alone do much to change the political structure of the country. Thailand’s notoriously heavy-handed laws around freedom of speech will also still be in place.

But most are in agreement that any legitimacy the junta once claimed to rule Thailand without a democratic mandate has long since run out.

“This will not be a fair election,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University. “But it is a necessary first step for Thailand to regain some balance. There is a long way to go yet.”

Due to a rewriting of the whole Thai political system since the last valid election in 2011, determining how the election will play out is not easy but one thing is for certain: this will not be a vote that releases Thailand from the clutches of military rule. Since 1932, Thailand has endured 13 successful military coups as well as seven attempted coups, more than any other country in the world.

Indeed, many fear that the election system will be so manipulated by the junta that 24 February will simply see the military returned to power through proxy political parties such as the Palang Pracharat party, recently formed by NCPO members, or will end up with Prayuth Chan-ocha, the incumbent prime minister under the military regime, selected to the role again.

“The military are just making this election up as they go along,” said Duncan McCargo, a political science professor at the University of Leeds specialising in south-east Asia. “But this time round the presence of an explicitly pro-military party, which we did not see in the last election, the long gap since the last competitive election, the continued restrictions on political activity and campaigning, and all kinds of built-in advantages to the junta all come together to make this election much harder to predict, and much less openly competitive than the last election.”

As McCargo put it, “the rules of the game have been rigged”, and certainly there are several factors skewing the whole electoral process in favour of the military. Over the past four years under its rule, all political campaigning, demonstrations and political parties have been suppressed – parties were only allowed to re-register in May. This has crippled the main opposition anti-military party, Pheu Thai, and prevented the emergence of other grassroots parties since 2014.

Even more crucially, there is the new constitution, drawn up by the NCPO and passed by referendum in 2017, which locks in military power and was written with the specific intention of making it very difficult for an opposition party such as Pheu Thai to form a majority government again. According to the constitution, all 250 seats in the Thai senate are either directly selected by the military or chosen by a committee appointed by the military, and so it is only the lower parliamentary house, with 500 MPs, that is democratically elected. But even that has its problems.

“I see the constitution as the biggest source of political ailments and social grievances in Thailand,” said Thitinan. “It is totally crooked and it was written to perpetuate military power in politics. The senate is a junta chamber and in the lower house they have obliterated the party system to make it entirely rigged for the military.”

The new rules would make it very possible for Prayuth to be brought back in as prime minister, even if the military political parties do not win a majority. According to the constitution, the prime minister is to be selected from a list after the election by a “joint session” of both senate and the lower house MPs. With all the senate already pro-military, he would need to club together 126 MPs in the lower house to win – just a quarter of the seats. Nonetheless, it still unclear whether the most conservative and pro-royalist party, the Democrat party – who have not won an election in decades but back in 2014 helped usher in the military coup – will remain loyal to the junta.

For observers, the scenario of Prayuth leading a minority coalition government could be highly problematic, not only because it would perpetuate the legacy of junta rule. “Legislation would be in gridlock and the government would be highly unstable,” said Thitinan.

The biggest competitor to the military remains the Pheu Thai party, which was created by the former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Despite being ousted in a military coup in 2006 and forced into exile, Thaksin still looms large over Thai politics, and to this day Thailand is sharply divided down pro-Thaksin and anti-Thaksin lines.

Polling by Pheu Thai and the military’s intelligence wing reportedly suggests Pheu Thai still has the most support across Thailand, one of the many reasons cited for the military postponing the election for so long. However, Pheu Thai has failed to find a leader who can unite the party and draw the same loyalty as Thaksin.

From January, parties will finally be allowed to campaign, though questions remain over the extent to which the junta will allow the opposition to freely spread its message. One party with a more progressive agenda is the Commoner party, led by the civil rights and environmental activist Lertsak Kamkongsak, which is still waiting to hear whether the military will allow it to register.

Lertsak was pessimistic about the election but said it was important to participate. “The whole system is messed up and totally against parties,” he said. “Prayuth will be the next prime minister for sure and this election will lead to the military government, but it won’t be completely under their control. I think they will last one to two years, and then there will be another election again.”

He added: “Personally, I think it’s going to be chaos. And [it will] probably lead to another coup.”

Navaon Siradapuvadol contributed reporting

• This article was amended on 11 January 2019. The headline and text of a previous version said that the upcoming election would be the first chance for Thais to vote in eight years. This did not take into account the election of February 2014, which was later invalidated by Thailand’s constitutional court.