Thaksin Shinawatra
Thaksin Shinawatra won every Thai election he contested and was removed from power twice without losing one. He was a police officer who left the force for business, built a telecommunications fortune on state concessions for paging and then mobile phones, and entered politics as one of the richest men in the country. His party won in 2001 on a programme aimed squarely at the rural north and north-east, which Bangkok politics had treated as a vote bank rather than a constituency: a thirty-baht universal health scheme, a village credit fund, and debt relief for farmers. It worked, and it was popular, and in 2005 he became the first Thai prime minister to be re-elected with an outright majority. What that popularity threatened was the arrangement by which the palace, the army and the Bangkok bureaucracy had settled who governed. His record supplied real grievances too - a war on drugs in 2003 in which some two thousand people were killed extrajudicially, the handling of the Muslim south including the Tak Bai deaths in custody, and lawsuits against critics - and his family's sale of its holding in Shin Corporation in 2006, structured to pay no tax, was the trigger. The army removed him that September while he was at the United Nations. He has lived mostly in exile since, convicted in absentia, while parties loyal to him have won every subsequent election they were allowed to contest and been dissolved by the courts or removed by the army four times. He returned in 2023 on the day his party formed a government with its former enemies, was jailed and paroled, and his daughter became prime minister the following year. He also owned Manchester City between 2007 and 2008, selling it to the Abu Dhabi group that owns it now. Human Rights Watch has never withdrawn its findings on the drug war, and no one has been prosecuted for those deaths. His sister Yingluck governed from 2011 until a court removed her in 2014.
- Lived: 1949 CE – ?
- Nationality: Thai
- Roles: politician
