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‘Back to square one’? Thailand confronts ghosts of its past with Shinawatra restoration
- The exiled billionaire bigwig of Thailand’s politics has engineered a dramatic return through his daughter Paetongtarn – but at what cost?
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Proud father to Thailand’s youngest-ever prime minister, a billionaire returned from the wilderness to the top of Thai power, and a one-time electoral star writing a sequel to one of Southeast Asia’s most remarkable modern political sagas – at the ripe old age of 75, Thaksin Shinawatra is back.
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He’s been pardoned from the convictions that drove him into 15 years of self-exile, with a third person bearing his surname – his daughter Paetongtarn – in the prime minister’s office. But experts warn that this return to power comes with an asterisk.
Though Thaksin’s Pheu Thai party has formed a coalition government, it failed to win the most votes in the last Thai election, instead being bumped into second place by the upstart, pro-democracy Move Forward Party – recently dissolved by the courts despite amassing 14 million votes.
That shocking electoral loss forced the Shinawatra clan to change its political clothes, with Pheu Thai now seen by critics as the underwriter of arch-royalist conservative elite interests – a far cry from its past as a pro-democracy outsider championing wealth-redistribution policies to the rural poor.
From 2001-2011, it earned three straight landslide election wins on the back of those policies. But now Pheu Thai leads a coalition of former enemies.
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