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

“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. 

Despite her extensive political connections, Paetongtarn is largely untested – only joining the family Pheu Thai party in 2021. Her main experience prior to that, notes the BBC, was as a hotelier with the Shinawatra-owned Rende hotel group. Paetongtarn describes herself as “a compassionate capitalist” and “social liberal”. But the tag she will have to live down is that of “daddy’s girl”.

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Paetongtarn Shinawatra renews a divisive legacy

No matter what she does in government, people will always assume her father is pulling the strings. A telecoms tycoon turned populist politician, Thaksin, 75, remains “a very divisive figure”. He was ousted in a 2006 coup and went into exile. On return to the country last year, a condition of his royal pardon was that he would keep a low profile. But he is still Pheu Thai’s main financial backer and has been “both visible and vocal at party events”. 

Thaksin swept to power in 2001 on a ticket of cheap medical care, debt relief and nationalism. His political heartland was the rural poor, but he was deeply unpopular among the Bangkok elite, who seized upon his 2006 decision to sell shares in one of Thailand’s biggest telecoms groups, Shin Corp, to Singaporean investors (netting family and friends $1.9 billion) to nail him for corruption. There followed a power struggle between the Shinawatra family and “the military royalist establishment”, says The Guardian. Thaksin’s brother-in-law briefly held power in 2008, while his sister Yingluck was PM from 2011 until 2014, when she too was ousted and exiled. 

The main reason the establishment is now prepared to back neophyte Paetongtarn is that they deem the alternative – the reformist Move Forward party, which is pushing to reform Thailand’s lèse-majesté law and the powers of the military – an even more dangerous proposition, says the FT. 

But while untested as a leader, she grew up steeped in politics and conflict. The youngest of Thaksin’s three children, she “had a front row seat” while he was in power, says Time: accompanying him on his first government job as foreign minister at the age of eight, and making headlines in 2004 when, as a student at Bangkok’s prestigious Chulalongkorn University reading political science, “she worked a part-time job at McDonald’s and her father dropped in”. She was 20 when Thaksin was deposed – hunkering down “in a safe house” while tanks patrolled Bangkok’s streets – and followed him to Britain, where she studied international hotel management at the University of Surrey. She is married to a commercial airline pilot. 

Some members of her family – including her mother – were reportedly against her entry into frontline politics, fearing a repeat of the conflicts that forced the clan to flee Thailand. She has “vowed to end a cycle of coups”, says Time. But what are the chances? Paetongtarn faces “the same risks that doomed her father and aunt’s governments”, with the added danger, says the FT, of being perceived as, at best, a “nepo baby leader”, and at worst a puppet, by a new generation of Thais frustrated with the status quo. Unless she quickly demonstrates she answers to the public, and not to her father, “her premiership could herald a new wave of volatility”.

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