Thailand’s rules required that anyone put forward to be the prime minister on Friday had to have been a candidate for the job last year. With Srettha gone, that left Paetongtarn and 75-year-old Chaikasem Nitisiri, who is said to be in ill health, from Pheu Thai’s ranks. The coalition decided not to put forward the ambitious Anutin Charnvirakul, the leader of the Bhumjaithai Party, and who until Thursday night was among the favourites.
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“She’s got some business background, but she’s not the same sort of high-calibre executive that her aunt in Yingluck was,” Australian National University senior lecturer Greg Raymond told this masthead.
“In interviews, I’ve seen her mention that she was quite aware of her own inexperience politically. She would be relying heavily on advisers, and I think it would be fairly unsurprising if one of those key advisers was her dad.
“It’s clear that Pheu Thai is already becoming increasingly reliant on support from the conservative military proxy parties, and that means that policy wise they’re probably going to be less inclined to be adventurous. At the same time, they’re facing an uphill battle to be competitive at the next election … I think they might be grasping at straws, personally.”
Until the emergence of Move Forward, Pheu Thai and its predecessor parties had won all national elections since 2001 with populist policies pledging to solve economic problems and bridge income inequality.
“The Pheu Thai party room would be thinking the Shinawatra name is still relatively powerful,” Raymond said.
“It’s declined in the last four or five years, particularly with the rise of [reformist] Move Forward and [predecessor] Future Forward – and it’s been damaged badly by going into this coalition with military proxy parties.
“But the Shinawatra brand sort of carries this aura of good economic management. Thaksin was quite a good economic manager, very creative, very hard driving, and he brought unprecedented wealth distribution policies.”
With AP
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