While the 11-party coalition comfortably backed her through the threshold of 248 lawmakers, Paetongtarn enters a cauldron of political rivalries between opposing elite factions, with her father and the Shinawatra political brand still highly influential but widely loathed by sections of the arch-royalist conservative establishment.
She will also be responsible for stewarding Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy as it scrambles to keep up with its regional peers, weighed down by massive household debt and an unstable government which are frightening off investors.
“Fundamentally, Pheu Thai’s focus is on boosting the economy, and China plays a major role in this strategy,” said Pongphisoot Busbarat, an assistant professor with Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.
Srettha followed the party’s line, and Paetongtarn was unlikely to deviate from the approach, he said, adding that Thaksin was well-known for his pro-China stance and his daughter might receive “considerable influence and advice” from her father.
“The difference between Srettha and Paetongtarn might simply lie in some aspects of policy implementation toward China, but it is unlikely to result in a radical shift or anything of that nature.”
Locally, two-time prime minister Thaksin, 75, sits at the crux of Thailand’s ulcerous two-year political divide.
His once magnetic electoral pull riled the conservative elite, which struck back with coups, mass protests and court cases against him and his affiliated parties, chasing the telecoms tycoon into self-exile for 15 years with graft convictions.
Thaksin’s Pheu Thai party has also lost its place as the establishment’s main threat, with its once unassailable grip over the Thai electorate usurped by the modernising, youth-facing Move Forward party, which stormed to a May 2023 election win.
Yet through his daughter, Thaksin now has a direct family line to the prime minister’s office and a young, fresh candidate to run against the progressive movement – now rebranded as the People’s Party.
Paetongtarn, better known by her Thai nickname “Ung Ing” – will only formally become prime minister after the king endorses her nomination by parliament, potentially over the coming days.
She will then propose a cabinet, in a process likely to involve intense horse-trading from the conservative coalition partners of her Pheu Thai party, who helped crater Srettha’s administration.
Paetongtarn grew up in Bangkok and studied hotel management in the UK. She married a pilot and the couple have two children. She held a lavish wedding reception at the Rosewood in Hong Kong in 2019, attended by Thaksin and her aunt Yingluck – both then in exile from Thailand.
She inherits a chaotic political landscape, stalked by former generals, tycoons and veteran power players in a kingdom where losers of elections rarely cede real power and democratic movements are routinely hammered by coups and court rulings.
On her side, Paetongtarn has household name recognition, and was a well-liked and energetic campaigner during last year’s election run-up, when she was heavily pregnant.
She has been an executive in multiple family companies and has a lifetime of political experience and loyalties from growing up inside one of Thailand’s most influential political dynasties.
But her promotion comes with dangers.
‘Neck on chopping block’
“This is a very risky move,” former staunch Thaksin ally Jatuporn Prompan told reporters earlier this week. “Her neck will be on the chopping block, so to speak … Is Thaksin ready to sacrifice his own daughter?”
A 2006 coup toppled Thaksin from office after he became Thailand’s only prime minister to win successive elections, and drove him into self-exile for 15 years.
He returned nearly one year ago. A second coup took out the government of his younger sister Yingluck in 2014. She still lives in self-exile to avoid jail in Thailand.
Experts also warn this may be Thaksin’s last roll of the dice, with no other direct family member in line to run for office if Paetongtarn falls into legal troubles or loses the next election, slated for 2027.
After two devastating rulings in the space of a week, the spotlight has returned to the role of the interventionist Constitutional Court, which has once again shaped Thailand’s political realities.
People’s Party leader Nattaphong Ruangpanyawut, who is also 37 and who will face Paetongtarn as the head of the opposition, urged the new government to target constitutional reform to address the “root causes” of Thailand’s political crisis including “lawfare wielded by the elite to destroy the power of the people”.
Pro-democracy advocates have decried the latest legal moves for disenfranchising millions of Thais and resulting in a coalition of parties which failed to win the polls, eventually leaving the country with a leader who was not elected by the public.