Thailand picks its youngest prime minister

On 16 August, the parliament in Bangkok elected a new prime minister, and the outcome had the feel of a family reunion conducted through the state’s formalities. Paetongtarn Shinawatra, 37, the leader of the Pheu Thai party and the youngest daughter of Thaksin Shinawatra, won a majority in the lower house and was formally appointed by the king two days later, making her Thailand’s second female prime minister and, at thirty-seven, the youngest the country has ever had. The speed of the succession was the point: the previous prime minister, Srettha Thavisin, had been removed by the constitutional court only two days earlier, on 14 August, for appointing a minister with a criminal record, and the ruling coalition, which was never going to survive a long vacancy, moved to fill the chair with the most reassuring name it had.

The dynasty is the story, and it is not a new one. Thaksin Shinawatra, the telecom tycoon who won two landslides and was deposed by the army in 2006, has spent the years since in exile, in courtrooms and in the peculiar orbit of Thai politics, where the same family keeps winning elections and losing governments. His sister Yingluck held the office and was ousted by a coup in 2014; his allies have been dissolved, disqualified and dispersed by the courts with a regularity that suggests a system, rather than a series of accidents. The return of the family in the person of the youngest daughter, who was campaigning for her father’s return from exile as recently as last year, is therefore not a novelty but a pattern completing itself, and the pattern says that the Shinawatras remain the only force that can reliably win the votes of the north and the northeast.

The circumstances of her ascent deserve a moment of attention, because they define the room she inherits. The conservative establishment that has spent two decades trying to break the family’s political machine now holds, on paper, a stronger position than ever: the courts that removed two prime ministers this year, the senate that the 2019 charter gave the right to vote on prime ministers, and a constitution written, in large part, to make the family’s kind of populism difficult to convert into power. Paetongtarn begins not with the mandate her father once had but with a coalition cobbled together from the remnants of a previous arrangement, including partners from the very forces that opposed her family for decades, and the arithmetic of that coalition is the most fragile furniture in the room.

Her programme is recognisably the family’s programme: cash handouts, debt relief, cheap credit, the economics of the north-east translated into policy. The country that receives it is older, richer and more divided than the one her father electrified in 2001, and the rural base that carried the dynasty has been courted, in the intervening years, by the parties of the old order as well. Whether the family’s medicine still works on a patient that has taken it for twenty years is the quiet question under all the ceremony, and the louder question, the one every Thai government must answer, is whether the establishment will allow her to govern or merely to sit.

The election of Paetongtarn is, in the narrowest sense, a victory for continuity: the same family, the same base, the same programme, returned to the same chair. In a wider sense it is a test of whether the machinery that has broken every Shinawatra government has finally met its match in patience, or whether the pattern will repeat one more time, with a younger face in the photographs and the same ending waiting in the wings. Thai politics has a habit of making the newest thing look like the oldest thing, and the day the youngest prime minister in the country’s history was sworn in, the oldest story in the country was still the one being told.