Paetongtarn Shinawatra becomes Thailand's youngest-ever PM – will she succeed?

Paetongtarn Shinawatra is joining the family business: both her father and aunt have governed the country. She has promised to “end a cycle of coups”. Can she?

Thailand's Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra at the Pheu Thai party headquarters
(Image credit: Peerapon Boonyakiat/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

“Politics is increasingly returning to be a family business in Southeast Asia,” says Bloomberg: in the Philippines, Cambodia, Indonesia and now Thailand – where Paetongtarn Shinawatra, daughter of the deposed former leader, billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra, took office last month just days after her predecessor was ousted by a shock court ruling. 

Known in Thailand by her nickname Ung Ing, at 38 she is Thailand’s youngest-ever prime minister, and the second woman to hold the post; the first was her aunt, Yingluck Shinawatra. And she is entering a political minefield. 

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.