Paetongtarn Shinawatra has been selected as the next Prime Minister of Thailand – The Diplomat

Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the daughter of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, has been chosen as the country’s next prime minister, two days after the court-ordered ouster of her predecessor Srettha Thavisin.

In a parliamentary vote today, Pheu Thai Party leader Paetongtarn won the support of 319 members of the House of Representatives, representing all 11 parties in the current ruling coalition. This compared to 145 votes against and 27 abstentions.

Paetongtarn, 37, will become the country’s youngest ever leader and the third Shinawatra claim to do so, after her father Thaksin (2001-2006) and aunt Yingluck (2011-2014). Her appointment underscored the political dominance of the Chiang Mai clan, which has been a dominant, if controversial, force in Thai politics since Thaksin’s landslide election victory in 2001.

Her appointment came after Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, a former real estate mogul from Pheu Thai who took office after last year’s general election, was ousted in a shock Constitutional Court ruling, less than a year after upon taking office. On Wednesday, the court voted 5-4 to remove Srettha from office for an “ethical violation” related to appointing to his cabinet 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 limited to candidates proposed by political parties ahead of last year’s election. Seven candidates were eligible, of which an eighth – Pita Limjaroenrat of the Move Forward Party – was excluded after another decision by the Constitutional Court on August 7, which dissolved his party and banned him from political activity for 10 years.

Pheu Thai nominated two other candidates: Paetongtarn and Chaikasem Nitisiri, 75, who served as justice minister in Yingluck Shinawatra’s government. There was some confusion yesterday over who Pheu Thai would nominate for the role, with reports early in the day suggesting Chaikasem, before the party jumped 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 while heavily pregnant, and was one of the party’s three candidates for prime minister. , although Srettha, another political neophyte, was eventually promoted. She was then elected Pheu Thai President in October.

Paetongtarn takes office at a tumultuous time in Thai politics. Srettha’s removal from office and the dissolution of the Move Forward Party, the largest party in the House of Representatives, have both been strongly denounced by foreign governments and human rights watchdogs.

Ahead of yesterday’s vote, Natthaphong Ruengpanyawut, head of the new People’s Party, which was formed as a successor to Move Forward two days after its dissolution and inherited its 143 MPs, addressed the House, condemning “the legal tactics used by the elites against the will of the people,” as paraphrased by the Thai Enquirer. He called on the elected MPs and the new prime minister to “address the underlying issues of the influence of appointed officials that led to today’s vote for a new prime minister”.

The rulings were just the latest in a long line of judicial interventions in Thai politics aimed at preventing the emergence of any political force or leader capable of threatening the power of the country’s conservative royal establishment. The ruling against Srettha, in response to what was a fairly minor violation, was widely interpreted as a signal to Thaksin to respect the boundaries of the political pact he and Pheu Thai made with the royalist organization last year . Under this arrangement, Thaksin was allowed to return from years of self-exile and saw Pheu Thai join conservative and military-backed parties – the very forces with which they had clashed so dramatically since before the ouster Thaksin in a 2006 coup.

The immediate purpose of this pact was to marginalize Move Forward, which won a plurality of the vote in last year’s election on a political platform that directly challenged the status quo. If elected, the party has promised to break up business monopolies, end conscription and change the lese-majeste law, which criminalizes criticism of the monarchy and the royal family. The party was blocked from forming the government by military-appointed senators and was later sent into opposition. (The Senate’s role in electing the prime minister expired at the end of the last term in May, which is why it did not participate in today’s vote.) The pledge to reform lèse-majeste then provided the pretext for Move Forward’s dissolution last week.

The selection of another Shinawatra, who will no doubt be viewed by Thaksin’s critics as a mere cipher for the billionaire populist leader, will create an interesting dynamic. If Srettha’s ouster was linked to conservative unrest over Thaksin’s political role, then his daughter’s accession is unlikely to assuage conservative concerns.

That she is so young and has little political experience will only intensify Paetongtarn’s need for her father’s political support – and her perception as a proxy for Thaksin. “She will be under control. It will be under a lot of pressure,” Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a political scientist at Chulalongkorn University, told the AFP news agency. “She’ll have to rely on her father.”

Behind this relationship stands the People’s Party, which has already inherited its predecessor’s status as Thailand’s most popular party. As things stand, the party looks set to prevail in 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 get through the rest of this term, there’s no reason to think Thailand’s two decades of political instability will end anytime soon.