Prem Tinsulanonda
Prem Tinsulanonda was prime minister of Thailand from 1980 to 1988, the army commander whom the parliament chose, unelected, when the elected Kriangsak fell over oil prices. He governed eight years of what the Thais called half-democracy, with an elected lower house, an appointed senate of officers, and a prime minister who belonged to no party and stood for no seat. He was, from the day he left office to the day he died, the president of the king's privy council and the man through whom the palace spoke to the army, which is why the coups of 2006 and 2014 were said to have his blessing and the red shirts of 2010 marched on his house. The eight years were the amnesty of 1980 that brought the Communist guerrillas out of the forests. There was the Cambodian border war in which Thailand hosted the Khmer Rouge and three hundred thousand refugees, and the coup attempts of 1981 and 1985 by the Young Turks, which the king's open support of him defeated. There was the devaluation of 1984 that the army chief opposed on television and lost his job for, and the boom that began in 1986 on Japanese factories and made Thailand the fastest-growing economy in the world for the next decade. He was born in Songkhla in the south in 1920, went through the cadet school into the cavalry, and fought in the Shan states in 1942. He commanded the Second Army in the north-east in the 1970s, where he ran the counter-insurgency that offered the Communists a way home instead of a war. He was army commander and defence minister from 1978. He was never married, lived simply, and was called Pa Prem, uncle, by a public that took his incorruptibility as a fact. He stepped down in 1988 when the parties finally asked for an elected prime minister, saying that he had had enough. The thirty-one years on the privy council, twenty-one of them as its president, made him the regime's manager in Bhumibol's old age. He was regent for the weeks between the king's death in October 2016 and Vajiralongkorn's accession. He died in Bangkok in May 2019 at ninety-eight. The king led the cremation.
- Lived: 1920 CE – 2019 CE
- Nationality: Thai
- Roles: prime minister, general, politician
