STORY: Thailand’s parliament elected political neophyte Paetongtarn Shinawatra as its youngest prime minister on Friday (August 16), only a day after she was thrust into the spotlight amid an unrelenting power struggle between the country’s warring elites.
Paetongtarn won with 319 votes or nearly two-thirds of the house. She was not present in parliament and watched the vote from Pheu Thai’s headquarters.
The 37-year-old daughter of divisive political heavyweight Thaksin Shinawatra sailed through a house vote and now faces a baptism of fire, just two days after ally Srettha Thavisin was dismissed as premier by a judiciary central to Thailand’s two decades of intermittent turmoil.
At stake for Paetongtarn could be the legacy and political future of the billionaire Shinawatra family, whose once unstoppable populist juggernaut suffered its first election defeat in over two decades last year, and had to do a deal with its bitter enemies in the military to form a government.
