BANGKOK (AFP) – Thailand’s Pheu Thai party has chosen 37-year-old Paetongtarn Shinawatra, the daughter of ex-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, as its candidate for prime minister, it announced yesterday, a day after a court dismissed the premier in an ethics case.
“We decide to nominate Paetongtarn Shinawatra,” party Secretary General Sorawong Thienthong told a press conference in Bangkok.
Lawmakers will vote today in Parliament – where Pheu Thai heads a governing coalition – on whether to approve Paetongtarn as prime minister.
“We are confident that the party and coalition parties will lead our country in helping with Thailand’s economic crisis,” Paetongtarn said after the announcement.
On Wednesday, Thailand’s Constitutional Court sacked premier Srettha Thavisin after ruling he had breached regulations by appointing a Cabinet minister with a criminal conviction, plunging the kingdom into fresh political uncertainty.
Pheu Thai – the electoral vehicle of one-time Manchester City owner Thaksin – is the largest member of a governing coalition of 11 parties that includes royalist and pro-military outfits who were once its bitter rivals.
Srettha is the party’s third prime minister to be kicked out by the Constitutional Court, and is leaving office after less than a year.
Thai politics has endured two decades of chronic instability marked by coups, street protests and court orders – much of it fuelled by the long-running battle by the military and pro-royalist establishment against progressive parties linked to their bete noire Thaksin.
The ex-premier returned to Thailand last August from 15 years in self-exile on the same day Srettha took power in an alliance with pro-military parties previously staunchly opposed to Thaksin and his followers.
The timing seemed to suggest a truce in the long-standing feud as both sides sought to see off the threat posed by the newer Move Forward Party (MFP), which won the popular vote in last year’s election.
