The Glow Wears Off Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra
Allegations of faking illness may send him back into exile, sources say
Thaksin Shinawatra, who made a triumphal 2023 return to Thailand and power as kingmaker and political puppeteer with a goal to save the country from ruin after 15 years in self-exile in Dubai, is seeing his influence melting, his signature economic plan in trouble and is under threat of possible confinement that might cause him to flee the country again.
The immediate problem faced by the 75-year-old former prime minister, who was ousted in a 2006 army coup, is an allegation that he faked the infirmities that resulted in a six-month stay in a VIP room on the 14th floor of Bangkok’s Police General Hospital – now sarcastically dubbed “the Thaksin suite” – after he returned from exile in August of 2023. He had been due to be sentenced to eight years in prison on corruption charges, reduced by King Maha Vajiralongkorn to a single year. On the night of his return, he experienced “serious heart and lung problems” and was transferred to the hospital where he remained before being granted a royal parole in February 2024.
It is almost certain that from the day he entered the hospital, the entire ruling elite – if not most of the country – knew the “serious heart and lung problems” were faked. That they are being questioned today is an indication of his loss of clout. It is also almost certain that his current predicament wouldn’t be happening if he weren’t faced with a dramatic loss of political influence.
Thaksin emerged from the hospital healthy and vigorous to travel across the country visiting party redouts to meet supporters and to strategize the economic and political pathways for his daughter Paetongtarn, the prime minister and titular head of Pheu Thai, the political party that he kept alive from Dubai and returned to power in a masterful demonstration of political legerdemain.
Complaints filed with court
A series of complaints was filed by political opponents with the Supreme Court starting almost immediately after Thaksin entered the hospital in 2023, alleging he wasn’t ill. (Some of those complaints are believed to have been generated sub rosa by leaders of the royalist Bhumjaithai political party, the second biggest in the ruling coalition and seemingly loyal to Thaksin’s forces.) Finally, in April this year, the court ordered an investigation with a hearing schedule for June 13, with all parties, including Thaksin, to be present. The Medical Council of Thailand has also formally resolved to discipline three doctors involved in Thaksin’s hospital stay.
It should be pointed out that Thaksin is one of Asia’s most skilled political tacticians, and writing him off would be a mistake. He survived the 2006 coup, escaping to Doha to spend the next 15 years bedeviling the military, reconstituting three different governments that he got elected and largely ran from 5,250 km away, using allies and relatives as surrogates. His period as prime minister from 2001 to 2006, with a series of populist measures to reduce poverty, expand infrastructure, promote small and medium-sized enterprises and extend universal healthcare coverage to improve the lives of Thailand’s rural poor made him wildly popular and awakened concerns among the country’s urban elites and royalists that they were witnessing the overthrow of their feudal structure – while also awakening concerns that he was unethical enough to establish a dictatorship.
Thaksin, according to a range of sources in Bangkok, won the right to come home during months of wheeling and dealing following the May 12, 2023 general election in which the youth-oriented reformist Move Forward Party headed by Pita Limjaroenrat shocked everybody by winning a plurality of 151 seats in the 500-member House of Representatives to Pheu Thai’s 141. After much murky jostling in which Move Forward and Pheu Thai had originally been expected to form a reform coalition led by the former, Move Forward was denied the right to form a government, Pheu Thai instead combined with several establishment and military parties to take power and the Constitutional Court barred Pita from politics. Move Forward was ordered dissolved by the courts.
“Thaksin has had a pretty good political run since doing the deal to sink the Move Forward Party government in exchange for return from exile, but now the walls are closing in and he's running out of tricks,” said Phil Robertson, the director of the Asia Human Rights and Labor Advocates NGO and a longtime observer of Thai politics. On May 8, for instance, the Criminal Court denied him permission to travel to Qatar, an indication he may have lost the protective cover of the country’s capricious king.
Avoiding prison
“His Achilles heel has always been the cushy arrangement made for him at the Police General Hospital to avoid actually serving a single day in prison, which is precisely why his myriad opponents have focused on this like a laser beam since day one,” Robertson said. “But few thought that the investigations could get so far as to call into question the actual health diagnoses justifying Thaksin's lengthy hospitalization in the hospital’s VIP suite.”
Thaksin’s return was possible “because of a green light from the Army and the King,” said a university political scientist. “But the deal wasn’t permanent, and they don’t need to order everything. The network monarchy can operate on its own. His increasing weakness only benefits the establishment.”
Part of the billionaire telecoms magnate’s troubles stem from his increasingly obvious machinations to run the country while ostensibly being in retirement and playing with his grandchildren. As soon as his probation was finished, he immediately threw himself back into the political wheeling and dealing that he was well known for during his years in exile, basically running political and economic affairs while his daughter stumbled as prime minister. The leaders of other parties in the coalition began bypassing her to work out their own arrangements.
The bigger problem, and one that paved the way home for him in the first place, was that the establishment was desperate to find a way to restart an economy sunk in corruption and ineptitude from nine years of rule by the army. “So much damage has been done to Thailand’s growth prospects and international standing that there is no time to waste in rectifying and revitalizing the country and its economy,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a Chulalongkorn University professor and one of the country’s most astute observers at the time. “It is likely to be far better than the nine years Thailand endured under General Prayuth Chan-ocha, the coup maker who became prime minister.”
But that didn’t happen, nor did anybody do anything about corruption, which, according to an informed source in the financial industry, has actually got worse.
14-point plan fizzles
Last August, Thaksin went public with an energetic 14-point plan to reorient government planning and spending toward individual Thais and small and medium enterprises, reducing the size of government and civil service and its export-oriented economy to build infrastructure that people will see and directly benefit from. The centerpiece was a “digital wallet” to transfer Bt10,000 baht (US$301) to all eligible Thai citizens aged 16 and above. Another was a draft law aimed at establishing casinos in billion-dollar entertainment complexes in tourism hot spots across the country.
“There is a vacuum of confidence in the economic front,” said Ben Kiatkwankul, a founding partner at Maverick Consulting Group in Bangkok. “The digital wallet was meant to be the engine of populist momentum and hasn’t landed as intended. Tourism numbers are underwhelming, and the government hasn’t been able to pivot the narrative to long-term structural reform or investor confidence. The Entertainment Complex bill as an engine of growth has been a subject to social and moral criticisms reminding us of the ghost of Thaksin’s past with patterns of political movements from years ago, familiar faces reactivating outside of parliament, narratives of secret ‘deals’ and an underlying mistrust of any policy framed as overly commercial. The government’s real test lies in regaining confidence from the public more than anything.”
Thaksin's troubles “couldn’t come at a worse time when nothing the government does is revitalizing the economy, a sense of national malaise is deepening, and the split with Bhumjaithai is out in the open and getting worse,” said AHRLA’s Robertson. “His problems mean Bhumjaithai can demand policy concessions and blunt high-profile Pheu Thai initiatives, like the casino complex bill that the government is pushing to get the economy back on track. The result is public infighting will deepen, and the government will look even more weak and ineffectual than it already does.”
But Thaksin is out of other options, sources say, because he betrayed Move Forward and unceremoniously discarded the progressive policy proposals Pheu Thai made during the 2023 election. Move Forward, reincarnated as “The People's Party,” is unlikely to cooperate. The Red Shirt movement that constituted the backbone of Pheu Thai support no longer exists, having been driven underground or out of the country by the military.
“The big question is whether the Thai people are tired enough of this political circus to double down on their 2023 vote for change, and make the People’s Party the next government in 2027,” Robertson said. The establishment, the courts, the royalty and the army have combined for decades to throttle reform even when the country’s peculiar form of democracy has produced a massive vote for it.