BANGKOK – Paetongtarn Shinawatra has been elected Thailand’s next prime minister, a dramatic and unexpected shift in national leadership that consolidates the family clan’s hold on politics but won’t necessarily stabilize them.
Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor – with 319 for, 145 against and 27 abstaining – of the 37-year-old political novice and loyal daughter of until recently self-exiled ex-premier and current ruling Peua Thai party patron Thaksin Shinawatra.
A property executive popularly known as “Ung Ing”, the photogenic Paetongtarn becomes Thailand’s youngest-ever premier and represents the fourth Shinawatra family member to lead the nation – with the previous three toppled by coups and courts.
Paetongtarn was being groomed to lead Peua Thai at general elections that must be held by 2027, giving the party’s aging stalwarts who decades ago won on a “think new, act new” ticket a badly needed youth infusion.
That dynastic timeline was expedited this week with the demise of Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, who was disqualified on August 14 in a Constitutional Court decision that ruled his Cabinet appointment of an ex-convict who once tried to bribe court judges with money in a bag in a case involving Thaksin constituted a breach of ethics.
Srettha’s short tenure will be remembered as largely ineffectual due to bureaucratic resistance to his populist digital wallet cash handout scheme but wholly harmless to conservative and royal interests, to which he bowed deeply and often.
Whether Paetongtarn takes the same conciliatory tack toward the royal establishment that drove her father and aunt into self-exile will be closely watched and key to stability and her own political survival.
Thaksin and his ex-wife were known to be reluctant to put their politically green daughter, who was pregnant on the 2023 campaign trail but showed a deft touch with Peua Thai’s red shirt-wearing crowds, in the line of fire so early in her political career.
That hesitance was clear in Thaksin’s initial endorsement of Peua Thai stalwart Chaikasem Nitsiri as the party’s pick for premier hours after Srettha’s fall. Conservatives quickly pounced on Chaikasem’s past calls to reform the lese majeste law, a blazing hot-button issue that brought down last week the election-winning progressive Move Forward party.
Chaikasem’s appointment would have split the coalition and signaled the backroom deal between Thaksin and palace representatives that brought Peua Thai together with military-aligned and conservative-leaning parties as uneasy bedfellows in the name of national unity ahead of last year’s poll was now defunct.
Srettha’s surprise court-ordered demise and the various conservative roadblocks that torpedoed his stimulus policies and with it the Thai economy may indicate the royal establishment has already abandoned the deal and will likewise seek to disrupt and stymie Paetongtarn’s rule.
If so, then Thaksin’s until now careful hand on Paetongtarn may have been deliberately pushed, putting her in power before she is ready for prime time.
Some conservatives attest Thaksin breached the terms of his royal pardon, bestowed by King Vajiralongkorn to allow him to return home from self-exile, by not spending a single night in prison for his criminal convictions and then overtly steering Srettha’s government from behind the scenes.
If that royal deal is indeed dead, Paetongtarn may face similar conservative resistance, particularly if she prioritizes a broached political amnesty that could bring her criminally convicted ex-premier aunt Yingluck Shinawatra home from self-exile. She could also face scrutiny of her own comments about lese majeste reform on last year’s campaign trail.
There are new signs the royalist noose is tightening again on the Shinawatras. Thaksin faces a new lese majeste charge, apparently not covered by his earlier royal pardon, for comments made to media in 2016, with a first hearing scheduled for August 19. Any move to withhold the ex-premier’s bail would mark a hard and clear escalation.
Paetongtarn’s moves will be closely and critically watched for signs of Thaksin’s paternal guidance. His command control was apparent even before she took the chair when announcing on August 15 Srettha’s 450 billion baht (US$12.5 billon) digital wallet handout, set for populist disbursal in November, would be scrapped.
Some speculate the digital wallet will be replaced by new “creative economy” village funds, a fiscal gambit Paetongtarn articulated in her first-ever English language speech to a foreign audience at a small-room American Chamber of Commerce event last November 30.
That would potentially give her a new-age signature policy that could seek to reprise and modernize Thaksin’s own “one village, one product” scheme, the brainchild of his then-top advisor Pansak Vinyaratn that showered one million baht on all of the country’s then 77,000 villages.
Indeed, Pansak’s voice was audible in Paetongtarn’s Am-Cham presentation, which referenced Harvard academic Joseph Nye’s notion of “soft power” as a model for Thai diplomacy and policy, and unabashedly lauded Thaksin and Pansak’s past grassroots policies aimed at the rural poor.
For Paetongtarn to succeed, however, she will need to convince Thailand’s voters and international investors her leadership truly represents a new, more innovative approach to Thailand’s economic woes and demographic challenges – and is not a mere stooge for Thaksin’s often grasping old guard.
That new-age mantle is now worn by the People’s Party, the new incarnation of the Move Forward party that was banned this month for campaigning to reform the lese majeste law, an electoral stance the Constitutional Court ruled was equivalent to trying to topple the constitutional monarchy.
A local authoritative poll conducted in mid-June showed Move Forward’s now-banned ex-leader Pita Limjaroenrat was favored by 45.5% to be prime minister, widely outpacing then-premier Srettha’s 12.85% and Paetongtarn’s 4.85%. (20.55% of respondents opted for “no satisfactory choice.”)
The same poll showed 49.2% would have chosen Move Forward if new elections were held, streets ahead of the second-placing Peua Thai’s 16.85%. While the People’s Party lamented Srettha’s court-ordered dismissal as “anti-democratic”, with the polls firmly on its side, the party declined to vote for Paetongtarn as his democratic replacement.
what is with these Asian countries? Dynastic rule!!! Get someone else. Marcos in the philippines is just a younger version of his father – corrupt to the core. Only difference being his wife doesn’t have a shoe fetish like his mother.