Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the daughter of Thailand’s former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, has been selected as the country’s next prime minister, two days after the court-ordered dismissal of her predecessor Srettha Thavisin.
In a parliamentary vote today, Paetongtarn, the leader of the Pheu Thai party, gained the support of 319 members of the House of Representatives, representing all 11 parties in the current governing coalition. This compared with 145 votes against and 27 abstentions.
Paetongtarn, 37, will become the country’s youngest-ever leader, and the third member of the Shinawatra claim to do so, after her father Thaksin (2001-2006), and aunt Yingluck (2011-2014). Her appointment has underscored the political dominance of the Chiang Mai-based clan, which has been a dominant, though controversial, force in Thai politics since Thaksin’s significant election victory in 2001.
Her nomination came after Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, a former real estate mogul from Pheu Thai who took office after last year’s general election, was unseated in a shock decision by the Constitutional Court, less than a year after taking office. On Wednesday, the court voted 5-4 to dismiss Srettha from office for an “ethical violation” relating to the appointment to his cabinet of an official who had previously served a prison sentence for bribing a court official.
Following the decision, parliament was given the opportunity to vote for his replacement, but was confined to the candidates put forward by the political parties ahead of last year’s election. Seven candidates were eligible, with an eighth – Pita Limjaroenrat of the Move Forward Party – ruled out after another Constitutional Court ruling on August 7 that dissolved his party and banned him from political activity for 10 years.
Pheu Thai had nominated two other candidates: Paetongtarn and Chaikasem Nitisiri, 75, who served as minister of justice in the Yingluck Shinawatra government. There was some confusion yesterday about who Pheu Thai would nominate for the role, with reports early in the day suggesting Chaikasem, before the party swung behind Paetongtarn, whose nomination was announced in the evening.
A political newcomer, Paetongtarn helped run the hotel arm of the Shinawatra family business before entering politics in 2021. She led the party’s campaign ahead of the May 2023 election, for a period while heavily pregnant, and was one of the party’s three prime ministerial candidates, though Srettha, another political neophyte, was eventually put forward. She was then elected Pheu Thai’s chairperson in October.
Paetongtarn takes office at a tumultuous time in Thai politics. Srettha’s removal from office and the disbanding of the Move Forward Party, the largest party in the House of Representatives, have both been roundly denounced by foreign governments and human rights watchdogs.
Ahead of yesterday’s vote, Natthaphong Ruengpanyawut, the head of the new People’s Party, which was founded as a successor to Move Forward two days after its dissolution and inherited its 143 MPs, addressed the House, condemning “the lawfare tactics used by elites against the will of the people,” the Thai Enquirer paraphrased him as saying. He called on elected lawmakers and the new prime minister to “address the underlying issues related to the influence of appointed officials that prompted today’s vote for a new premier.”
The rulings were just the latest in a long line of judicial interventions in Thailand’s politics designed to prevent the emergence of any political force or leader capable of threatening the power of the country’s conservative royalist establishment. The ruling against Srettha, in response to what was a fairly minor transgression, has been widely interpreted as a signal to Thaksin to respect the limits of the political pact that he and Pheu Thai made with the royalist establishment last year. Under this arrangement, Thaksin was allowed to return from years of self-exile and saw Pheu Thai join with conservative and military-backed parties – the very forces that they had clashed with so dramatically since before Thaksin’s removal in a coup in 2006.
The immediate purpose of this pact was to sideline Move Forward, which won a plurality of the votes at last year’s election on a policy platform that directly challenged the status quo. If elected, the party promised to break up business monopolies, end military conscription, and amend the lese-majeste law, which criminalizes criticisms of the monarchy and royal family. The party was blocked from forming the government by military-appointed senators, and was subsequently consigned to the opposition. (The Senate’s role in selecting the prime minister expired at the end of its last term in May, which is why it did not participate in today’s vote.) The lese-majeste reform pledge then offered the pretext for Move Forward’s dissolution last week.
The selection of another Shinawatra, who will doubtless be viewed by Thaksin’s critics as a mere cypher for the billionaire populist leader, will set up an interesting dynamic. If Srettha’s removal was related to conservative unrest over Thaksin’s political role, then the accession of his daughter will be unlikely to dampen conservative concerns.
The fact that she is so young and has little political experience will only intensify Paetongtarn’s need for her father’s political support – and the perception of her as a proxy for Thaksin. “She will be under scrutiny. She will be under a lot of pressure,” Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University, told the AFP news agency. “She will have to rely on her father.”
Looming behind this relationship is the People’s Party, which has by all accounts already inherited its predecessor’s status as the most popular party in Thailand. As things stand, the party seems likely to prevail at the next election, currently scheduled for 2027, when the Senate will not be able to block it from power as it did last year. Even if Paetongtarn manages to serve out the remainder of this term, there is little reason to think that Thailand’s two decades of political instability will come to an end anytime soon.