Vajiralongkorn
Vajiralongkorn, Rama X, has been King of Thailand since his father Bhumibol's death in October 2016, the first man to succeed to the throne in seventy years and the least loved of the Chakri kings, who spent most of his first years of reign in Bavaria, took personal control of the Crown Property Bureau's forty billion dollars and of two army regiments in 2017 and 2019, had the constitution the junta had written amended to let him rule from abroad, married his bodyguard as his fourth wife on the eve of his coronation in 2019 and made another his official consort three months later, and became in 2020 the object of the first open criticism of the monarchy in Thai public life, when students in Bangkok held up three fingers and asked what the king was for. The lese-majeste law, which gives fifteen years a count, has been used against hundreds of them since. He was born in 1952, the only son among Bhumibol's four children, was educated in England and at Duntroon in Australia, flew fighters and commercial airliners, and was made crown prince in 1972. His father's reign was so long and his own reputation, for a temper, for divorces and for a poodle made an air chief marshal, so poor that the succession was discussed in Bangkok as a problem for forty years. Bhumibol died on 13 October 2016 and the son asked for time to mourn before accepting, which took seven weeks. The junta of General Prayut, which had taken power in 2014, gave him what he asked: the amendments of 2017 that removed the need for a regent when he was abroad, the law of the same year that transferred the crown's assets, held by a bureau since 1936, to his personal ownership, and the transfer of the 1st and 11th infantry regiments to the palace's command in 2019. He was crowned in May 2019 in three days of ceremony. The protests of 2020, which began over the dissolution of an opposition party and turned to the monarchy in August, demanded that the king's powers and wealth be returned to the state and were met with arrests under the lese-majeste law that his father had not used for years. He lives in Thailand more since the pandemic, and Queen Suthida and the royal noble consort Sineenat appear beside him. The succession is his son Dipangkorn, and the argument about the monarchy's place is the argument of Thai politics.
- Lived: 1952 CE – ?
- Nationality: Thai
- Roles: king, monarch
