Yingluck Shinawatra was confirmed as Thailand’s first female prime minister yesterday, faced with the daunting challenge of bringing stability to the kingdom after five years of political turmoil.
Yingluck, sister of fugitive former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, retained an air of calm confidence after she won a parliamentary vote to become prime minister with the support of 296 members of the lower house out of a potential 500.
The country’s 28th prime minister, who was catapulted from relative obscurity to election victory by her older brother’s support, can expect royal endorsement within days to formalize her position.
Photo: Reuters
“I am excited to start work,” she told reporters after the vote. “People will judge whether my work satisfies them and meets their expectations or not.”
Yingluck’s Puea Thai party and its partners command a three-fifths parliamentary majority after a resounding victory in the July 3 election over the pro-establishment Democrats.
The 44-year-old surprised observers with her assured campaign style and she has since consolidated her parliamentary dominance by forming a six-party coalition that accounts for 300 of the legislature’s 500 seats.
Yingluck, described by her brother as his “clone,” yesterday again rejected suggestions that Thaksin, who lives abroad to avoid a jail term for corruption, is controlling her party from afar.
Asked if she was in contact with her brother, she replied: “No, I am not talking to anyone.”
Thailand has seen a period of instability since Thaksin, the only prime minister in the country’s history to win a second term, was removed from power in a 2006 military coup backed by Thai elites.
A group of about a hundred of his “Red Shirt” supporters gathered outside the parliament building ahead of the vote yesterday morning, many wearing their signature colored tops bearing pictures of Yingluck’s face.
Yingluck is expected to face pressure from the mainly poor and working class Red Shirts, many of whom support Thaksin for his populist policies during his 2001-2006 rule. The movement will expect justice over its April and May rallies last year that ended with a military assault and more than 90 people dead.
Analysts believe a key test for the newcomer will simply be whether she can hang on to power in a country where the removal of leaders is commonplace.
Thailand has seen 18 actual or attempted coups since it became a constitutional monarchy in 1932 and only one prime minister in that time has served a full four-year term — Thaksin.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees