On Tuesday Thailand’s Constitutional Court suspended Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra from office, pending an enquiry into a leaked phone call between her and former Cambodian leader Hun Sen. In the conversation, she referred to Hun Sen as “uncle” and made derogatory remarks about a top Thai army commander, words which in the context of heightened tensions in the Emerald Triangle border area between the two countries triggered mass protests in Thailand and the exit of the Bhumjaithai Party, her governing coalition’s second-largest member.
This could bring to a premature end Ms Paetongtarn’s short-lived political career – she only became prime minister last August. But the bigger question is: does this herald the beginning of the end for the whole Shinawatra dynasty?
For the last 25 years, the family, headed by Thaksin Shinawatra, who was prime minister from 2001 to 2006, has almost completely dominated electoral politics in the country. He was ousted in a coup backed by Thailand’s powerful army, and his sister Yingluck was also forced from office in 2014 after three years as prime minister.
But time after time, when elections were held, Thaksin-backed parties kept on winning. In 2023, Mr Thaksin returned from self-imposed exile, on the same day a new government led by his supporters’ party, Pheu Thai, was formed. Since the new coalition included parties aligned with the royalist-military establishment previously deeply opposed to Mr Thaksin – whose critics have accused him of irresponsible populism and corruption – it seemed that an accommodation had finally been reached between the country’s two most important blocs.
On his arrival in Thailand, Mr Thaksin was arrested and taken into custody, but the convictions to which he had been sentenced in absentia were reduced days later to just one year in jail, and after spending six months in a luxury hospital he was released on parole. Appearances were satisfied. Mr Thaksin was home. And months later, his youngest daughter Paetongtarn became prime minister.
The rapprochement between Mr Thaksin’s supporters and the country’s conservative institutions may have been a shaky alliance of convenience. But it could not last after details of Ms Paetongtarn’s call with Hun Sen came out. In the conversation, which both sides have confirmed as authentic, Ms Paetongtarn referred to her country’s military as “the opposite side” and accused a general at the border of just wanting “to look cool and saying things that are not useful”. Cambodia’s longtime former prime minister, whose son Hun Manet succeeded him in 2023, has since gone further.
According to the Khmer Times, this week Hun Sen accused the Thaksins of insulting their country’s king in private conversations with him and said Ms Paetongtarn “conspiring with foreigners to denigrate one’s own military”, as he put it, was tantamount to treason.
Why did Hun Sen make such incendiary comments and release a full recording of the phone call, especially since he had been close to Mr Thaksin for decades? The border issue is highly sensitive – a Cambodian soldier was killed in clashes with Thai forces in May – and some speculate it was an attempt to rally patriotic sentiment around Hun Manet. The former Cambodian leader also accused the Thaksins of having a history of saying one thing to him about the border disputes and then another in public.
Either way, the damage has been done. And it’s not just Ms Paetongtarn who’s in trouble. On the same day that she was suspended from office, her father was in a Bangkok court to hear prosecution testimony over a lese-majeste charge he faces relating to an interview he gave in South Korea in 2015. Mr Thaksin may have thought this would just be a formality, given the understanding he believed had been reached with the royalist-military forces.
But as the Thai academic Pavin Chachavalpongpun wrote in a prescient analysis published on Monday: “The lese majeste case against Thaksin, or [the] Constitutional Court case against Paetongtarn, could be strategically used to neutralise their influence, putting them in jail or (more likely) letting them flee.”
In that event, could the Thaksins still make another comeback in the future? It can’t be completely ruled out, and it may be just possible that the current governing coalition holds on, as it still has a majority in Parliament. But many believe that the Thaksin coalition – low-income workers in the country’s north and north-east, plus progressive-minded urban middle classes – has been irretrievably weakened.
Pheu Thai has been outflanked by the social democratic Move Forward Party, which beat them into second place in the 2023 election, and severely disillusioned their progressive supporters by allying with the conservative forces who kept ousting Mr Thaksin and his successors from power. Younger voters don’t remember Mr Thaksin’s glory years, when he instituted universal health care and a raft of polices that helped rural voters. Paetongtarn Shinawatra is a novice who plainly owed her job solely to her surname. Her approval rating was at a meagre 9.2 per cent in March.
Mr Thaksin is still a giant of Thai politics. But he’s not the figure he once was, and he has run out of family proxies to take the country’s top job while he remains a power behind the curtain. No one would accept one of his other two – politically inexperienced – children as prime minister. And, in any case, it’s not clear they, or Pheu Thai, could command a majority in Parliament.
So, is this the end for the Shinawatra dynasty? Thai politics is too unpredictable to tell. If it is the beginning of the end, however, Thailand’s perennial problem will remain: how to square the views of the royalist-military establishment, who see themselves as guardians of the country, with populist or left-leaning parties that keep topping the polls. That’s the democratic conundrum that has been both the blessing, and the misfortune, of the Shinawatra family.
