Paetongtarn Shinawatra’s face beamed from the side of a campaign truck as she addressed crowds of her supporters. “I am happy I have the chance to talk to you, Chiang Mai people,” she said last month. “It’s too bad I could not be there in person.”
Then eight-and-a-half months pregnant, Paetongtarn, 36, who is running to become Thailand’s next prime minister, has been unable to travel during the final leg of election campaigning. Instead, in a red jacket, the trademark colour of her Pheu Thai party, she video-called her supporters in Chiang Mai, in the north, from a hospital in Bangkok.
In front of her screen a row of supporters, who had turned out despite the baking heat, sat beneath a white marquee, sheltering from the sun.
Chiang Mai is the hometown of Paetongtarn’s father, ex-PM Thaksin Shinawatra – the country’s most popular politician, and its most polarising. He, and his sister, former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra, were fiercely opposed by the royalist military establishment. He was ousted in a coup in 2006, and she was removed from office in 2014. Both live in exile to avoid legal cases.
“Just the word Chiang Mai is already enough to warm my heart,” Paetongtarn’s voice echoed from a speaker. “My father and my aunt were born there, and I miss them.”
As she held her hands to the camera in a love heart gesture, her audience, many of them the same age as her father, clapped and cheered.
Paetongtarn was a university student when a political crisis engulfed his premiership and divided the country. For rural voters in the north and the northeast, Thaksin, who first came to power in 2001, was a hero. He was the first politician to recognise their importance as voters, and offered policies such as universal health coverage that made a real difference to their lives.
“In the old days we had a common saying – people would say they sold their rice field to receive medicine,” said Attachak Sattayanurak of Chiang Mai University’s department of history. Thaksin’s policies allowed people in rural areas the chance to climb the ladder, and they became far more politically engaged, he added: “He transformed Thai people into Thai citizens.”
But for royalist conservatives he was a corrupt businessman who exploited the country for his own gain, and whose popularity was a threat to the country’s monarchy.
At the peak of the crisis in 2006, Paetongtarn, known as Ung Ing, was studying at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, an elite, conservative institution. In her year group of about 200 political science students, there were perhaps 10 who sympathised with Thaksin, says one of her old university friends. In class, professors did not hide their dislike for her father. On the campus, students hung posters with Thaksin’s face crossed out; her friends tried to steer her away in the opposite direction, so that she wouldn’t have to walk past them.
It was on 19 September that year that Paetongtarn’s mother called to say that tanks were on the streets. She couldn’t go home, but should drive straight to a safe house; her father, who was abroad attending the UN general assembly, had been ousted. “I was so scared. I was still in my uniform,” Paetongtarn told the Thai media last year. “I called my sister, crying. I was full of fear.”
Eight years later, her aunt Yingluck was removed from office by a court ruling and the military took power again.
Such memories “probably inform her determination to seize the reins of power, whether it’s for Pheu Thai, for its supporters, for herself, or for her father,” said Napon Jatusripitak, a visiting fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
After graduating, Paetongtarn studied hotel management at Surrey University in Guildford, England and later returned to Thailand to work in her family’s business empire. In 2021 she was appointed chief adviser for participation and innovation in Pheu Thai, the party associated with her father, and this year was selected as one of three prime ministerial candidates for the party.
Paetongtarn and her party have performed well in polling, and last week, in a press conference held days after giving birth, she said she was confident of a landslide. She has been boosted by the Shinawatra name, which has proved unbeatable at the ballot box, and has offered policies such as a rise in the minimum wage. She has, however, faced questions over whether she is politically experienced enough to run the country.
Paetongtarn faces other challenges. The system, set up after the 2014 coup, is skewed in favour of military-linked candidates such as incumbent Prayuth Chan-ocha, the former army general who led the coup, and Prawit Wongsuwan, who was part of the junta. Thailand’s 250 senators, who were appointed by the military, have a say in the picking the next PM. It means this month’s election is unpredictable: even if her party wins the most seats, she may not be able to take power.
Paetongtarn must also grapple with the demands of younger generations, who in mass protests in 2020 called for major structural reforms of Thai society, including the role of the military and the powerful monarchy. Many have flocked to Move Forwardthe most progressive party on such issues. It has seen large turnouts of young voters at its rallies, including a recent event in Chiang Mai.
Pheu Thai has made an effort to appeal to younger voters by talking about LGBT equality and promising an end to mandatory military conscription, said Panuwat Panduprasert, assistant professor in political science at Chiang Mai University.
Thaksin also runs regular talks on Clubhouse, where he talks about current topics such as AI or cryptocurrency. “But Thaksin still remains somewhat clumsy on certain occasions,” added Panuwart. Comments about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was “a clown”, are not in tune with younger people’s pro-democracy outlook.
When asked if she would support reform to Thailand’s infamously strict lese-majesty law, Paetongtarn has said this should be discussed in parliament. More than 230 people, including children, have been charged under the law since the 2020 protests.
Even if Pheu Thai can manage to secure enough support to form a government, it could face extra-parliamentary threats in the future, including from the courts. Complaints against the party have already been lodged with the Election Commission, according to reports.
Thaksin’s comments that he wants to return to Thailand raise the stakes further. He was convicted in absentia over corruption-related cases and would face jail if he returned.
It is possible a return could lead to protests, which could build towards another coup, said Panuwat Panduprasert, assistant professor in political science at Chiang Mai University.
In Chiang Mai, 77-year-old Saiton Sitthipranee says she’d rather not talk about Prayuth, the general who has run the country since the military last seized power. “You can see what they did for the past eight years. They can’t do anything, they can’t develop the country, the economy is bad.”
She believes in Pheu Thai, she added, and backs Paetongtarn: “She is from the bloodline of Thaksin.”
