With enemies like this, who needs friends? After years of mutual loathing, coups, chaos and even bloodshed, the fight between Thailand’s military-royalist establishment and controversial former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra has ended – for now – in a seismic new deal. The exiled tycoon flew back from self-imposed exile on Tuesday thanks to an unacknowledged political bargain with the army that ousted him. His ally Srettha Thavisin, of the Pheu Thai party, became prime minister on the same day with the support of military-backed parties, breaking the months of deadlock that followed May’s election – and ending a decade of military rule.
Thaksin, a billionaire telecoms entrepreneur turned populist politician, swept to power in 2001 thanks to rural Thais and the urban poor. For a while, he raised their living standards – but he also oversaw massive corruption and grim human rights abuses. After the army toppled him, he was convicted in absentia of abuses of power and chose to stay abroad. Since then, his proxies have triumphed at polls but been thwarted by the conservative elites, with his sister removed as prime minister by another coup in 2014.
