Fresh-faced Shinawatra takes the helm in tumultuous Thailand

BANGKOK – Paetongtarn Shinawatra has been elected Thailand’s next prime minister, a dramatic and unexpected shift in national leadership that consolidates the family clan’s hold on politics but won’t necessarily stabilize them.

Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor – with 319 for, 145 against and 27 abstaining – of the 37-year-old political novice and loyal daughter of until recently self-exiled ex-premier and current ruling Peua Thai party patron Thaksin Shinawatra.

A property executive popularly known as “Ung Ing”, the photogenic Paetongtarn becomes Thailand’s youngest-ever premier and represents the fourth Shinawatra family member to lead the nation – with the previous three toppled by coups and courts.

Paetongtarn was being groomed to lead Peua Thai at general elections that must be held by 2027, giving the party’s aging stalwarts who decades ago won on a “think new, act new” ticket a badly needed youth infusion.

That dynastic timeline was expedited this week with the demise of Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin, who was disqualified on August 14 in a Constitutional Court decision that ruled his Cabinet appointment of an ex-convict who once tried to bribe court judges with money in a bag in a case involving Thaksin constituted a breach of ethics.

Srettha’s short tenure will be remembered as largely ineffectual due to bureaucratic resistance to his populist digital wallet cash handout scheme but wholly harmless to conservative and royal interests, to which he bowed deeply and often.

Whether Paetongtarn takes the same conciliatory tack toward the royal establishment that drove her father and aunt into self-exile will be closely watched and key to stability and her own political survival.

Thaksin and his ex-wife were