Prayut Chan-o-cha

Prayut Chan-o-cha was commander-in-chief of the Royal Thai Army, then the general who seized power in the coup of May 2014, and then prime minister of Thailand for nine years until 2023. He was appointed army chief in 2010 with a reputation as a royalist hardliner and an opponent of Thaksin Shinawatra, and was among the leading advocates of the military crackdowns on the Red Shirt demonstrations of 2009 and 2010. When months of street protests paralysed Yingluck Shinawatra's government, he declared martial law and then took power outright on 22 May 2014, installing the National Council for Peace and Order. The junta governed by decree for five years, detaining critics for what it called attitude adjustment and prosecuting dissent under the lese-majesty law. It wrote a new constitution, approved in a referendum held under a ban on campaigning against it, which gave the military the power to appoint the entire 250-member Senate. That Senate voted with the elected lower house to choose the prime minister, and in 2019 it returned Prayut to the office he already held, converting a junta into a civilian government without changing who ran it. He was also his own defence minister. Mass youth-led protests in 2020 broke a long taboo by demanding reform of the monarchy itself as well as his resignation. He survived several no-confidence votes, and a court ruled in 2022 that his eight-year term limit ran only from 2017. His party was beaten badly in the 2023 election and he left politics, taking a seat on the Privy Council.

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