Paetongtarn Shinawatra, a frontrunner for the prime minister’s job in Thailand’s general election this month, will rejoin the campaign trail just days after giving birth to her second child to help her Pheu Thai Party’s bid to end a near-decade military-backed rule.
(Bloomberg) — Paetongtarn Shinawatra, a frontrunner for the prime minister’s job in Thailand’s general election this month, will rejoin the campaign trail just days after giving birth to her second child to help her Pheu Thai Party’s bid to end a near-decade military-backed rule.
“I’m very ready to return to the campaign,” she told reporters Wednesday at her family-controlled hospital in Bangkok, where she delivered a baby boy on May 1. “We need to make the landslide happen for Pheu Thai” in the May 14 vote, she said.
Paetongtarn, who is one of Pheu Thai’s three prime minister candidates and leads her rivals by more than 15 points in some polls, said Thai voters will “vote for a change.” Stakes are high as the election is cast as a contest between the pro-establishment parties of the ruling military-backed coalition that’s helmed the country since a coup in 2014 and the pro-democracy opposition led by Pheu Thai.
Pheu Thai, which has built its campaign around measures to boost household income to counter high debt and cash injection to stimulate the economy, is on course to win the majority of votes in the election to the 500 members of the House of Representatives, according to several surveys. But the party will either need to form a coalition with other parties or win support of a section of the 250-member military-appointed Senate to install its candidate as prime minister.
Pheu Thai is backed by ousted leader Thaksin Shinawatra, an enduring yet polarizing figure in Thai politics whose term was marked by allegations of corruption. Thaksin, who was ousted in a 2006 military coup and has lived abroad to avoid a jail term for a corruption conviction, said this week he wants to return to Thailand to meet his seventh grandchild.
Parties linked to Thaksin have won the most seats in every election since the turn of the century, supported by voters from Thailand’s vast rural heartlands, only to be unseated by military coups or dissolutions backed by conservative authorities who disapprove of their populist agendas.
With the election just days away, Paetongtarn reiterated that her party was open to an alliance with like-minded outfits, even as she urged voters to cast their ballots strategically. Votes against the incumbents shouldn’t be divided among the diverse opposition groups and result in a weaker position for the pro-democracy camp of parties, she said.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.