Yingluck Shinawatra
Yingluck Shinawatra was Thailand's first woman prime minister, and was removed by a court two weeks before the army removed the rest of her government. She was the youngest sister of Thaksin, ran the family's property and telecommunications businesses, and had never held office when Pheu Thai put her forward in 2011 as its candidate; the party won a clear majority, and opponents called her a proxy from the first day. Her government raised the minimum wage, and its central policy was a rice pledging scheme that bought the crop from farmers at roughly half above the market price. It was popular in the countryside and expensive everywhere else: Thailand lost its position as the world's largest rice exporter, the stockpiles rotted, and the losses ran into billions. The political crisis came from a different direction. In late 2013 her party proposed an amnesty bill broad enough to cover her exiled brother, which brought Bangkok into the streets; the opposition boycotted and then physically blocked the February 2014 election, the courts annulled it, and in May the constitutional court removed her over the transfer of a security official three years earlier. The army took power three weeks later. She was impeached retroactively by a military-appointed assembly, banned from politics for five years, and prosecuted over the rice scheme; she fled the country in 2017 shortly before a verdict of five years in prison. Her niece Paetongtarn became prime minister in 2024 and was removed in 2025. She had run the family's SC Asset property company and been managing director of AIS, the mobile operator her brother founded, before entering politics at forty-four. The rice scheme's losses are still argued over, since the accounting depended on how the unsold stockpile was valued. She lives in Dubai. Three prime ministers from her family have now been removed by a court or the army, and none has completed a term.
- Lived: 1967 CE – ?
- Nationality: Thai
- Roles: politician
