For a man who spent most of the past 20 years in exile, and the past eight months in jail, the figure of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra still looms large over Thailand.
His release from prison in Bangkok, at the age of 76 and wearing an electronic ankle bracelet, after serving part of a one-year sentence for corruption and abuses of power during his terms as prime minister from 2001 to 2006, was headline news in Thailand.
His party Pheu Thai’s insistence that from now on he will remain in the background could not stop feverish media speculation over what role he might still play in Thai politics.
This is hardly surprising.
From the moment he swept to power in January 2001 Thaksin, a brash, self-made billionaire, has sought to reshape his country, winning devoted supporters and bitter opponents in equal measure. His parties kept winning elections, even after he was deposed by a coup in September 2006, but fear of his vaunting ambition in the powerful royalist establishment led to multiple court rulings against his allies, years of violent street clashes, and another coup in 2014.
Yet he refused to step back. He continued to run his party from abroad, and, after an apparent ‘grand bargain’, his conservative opponents allowed him to come home in 2023, to direct it once it was back in government again. Thaksin seems incapable of taking a back seat, whatever he may say about spending more time with his grandchildren.
This time, though, it really could be different.
Thaksin was jailed last September, after the Supreme Court ruled that the six months he spent in a police hospital after his return to Thailand had been a ruse to avoid serving his sentence.
This verdict followed the collapse of the Pheu Thai-led coalition government less than two weeks earlier, when the Constitutional Court dismissed his daughter Paetongtarn as prime minister over a leaked phone conversation she had had with the Cambodian leader Hun Sen over how to handle the border dispute between the two countries. Once again, the powerful, conservative courts were determining his party’s fate, as they have so often in the recent past.
While Thaksin was behind bars, Pheu Thai had its worst-ever result in the February general election. It was pushed down to third place behind the reformist People’s Party, and eclipsed by the conservative Bhumjaithai party, which benefitted from a surge of nationalist sentiment after the border war with Cambodia. Pheu Thai has been forced to accept being a junior coalition partner in the new government.
“Thaksin emerges from prison to a new political environment”, says political analyst Ken Lohatepanont. “Pheu Thai has been sidelined as just a mid-sized party. You can never count Thaksin out, but the challenge that he and his Party face is of a different magnitude to those he has faced in the past. Pheu Thai will have to decide whether a public comeback for Thaksin will boost the party, or whether the party might be better served by placing the spotlight on their newer generation leaders.”
The jury is still out in Thailand over why the ‘grand bargain’ with royalist forces which had allowed Thaksin to end his long exile in 2023 collapsed so quickly. Had the conservatives always intended to use the courts to cripple the governments his party led? His first choice of prime minister was also dismissed by the courts on a seemingly trivial pretext. Or were they provoked into moving against him by his refusal to stay in the background, his determination to drive his party’s agenda and to explore new and controversial areas of business?
Either way, the mistrust between Thaksin and Thai conservatives is now probably insurmountable. Even if he does still hanker after a prominent political role, he will almost certainly be barred from getting one.
The past 25 years in Thailand could reasonably be called “the Thaksin era”. That era is almost certainly over.
