Srettha’s exit: are Thailand’s conservatives on the rise, democracy in retreat?

Pheu Thai, the largest party in that coalition, now has a choice between 75-year-old former justice minister Chaikasem Nitisiri and the untested Paetongtarn Shinawatra, 37, the daughter of party patriarch Thaksin Shinawatra.

Chaikasem appears to be the front-runner for a vote due on Friday in parliament for a new prime minister.

Rumours on Thursday afternoon mounted that party leader Paetongtarn may instead be forwarded for the vote, raising the potential of a third Shinawatra direct family member to hold the post.

If Chaikasem succeeds, he will become Thailand’s oldest ever prime minister. Despite a recent history of ill health, he is seen as a safe steward of Thaksin’s interests.

Thaksin, the divisive billionaire and influential two-time ex-prime minister, is hogging the headlines once again. He returned to Thailand almost a year ago after a jail sentence for corruption which prodded him into 15 years in self-exile and was pardoned by Thailand’s powerful king. That signalled an apparent deal with the conservatives who once saw his electoral magnetism as the gravest threat to their ascendancy.

That bargain was sealed to snuff out a new danger – the 2023 election-winning Move Forward party – which was outmanoeuvred from forming a government.

Instead, Srettha, a political neophyte with limited pull inside Pheu Thai, became the party’s prime minister to lead a coalition of conservatives including military-aligned parties.

Srettha’s downfall suggests all is not well inside the coalition and the terms of Thaksin’s deal to return could be on the table.

Yet Pheu Thai “will almost certainly remain in government,” political analyst Ken Lohatepanont said, even if its hold on the premiership “has become quite tenuous” given Srettha’s