Thaksin Shinawatra

Thaksin Shinawatra (born 1949 in Chiang Mai) is a Thai businessman, founder of the Shin Corporation telecommunications group, who entered politics in the 1990s and founded the Thai Rak Thai ("Thais Love Thais") party in 1998. He won a landslide victory in the January 2001 general election and became Prime Minister, returning to office after another sweeping win in February 2005 — the first elected Thai premier to complete a full term.

His government is associated with a populist policy platform branded "Thaksinomics," including a universal healthcare scheme (the 30-baht programme), village microcredit funds, and debt relief for farmers, which generated strong electoral loyalty in Thailand's rural north and northeast. Critics, concentrated among the Bangkok middle class, royalists, and military, accused him of conflicts of interest, suppression of press freedom, extrajudicial killings during a 2003 "war on drugs," and heavy-handed policy in the Muslim-majority south.

In September 2006, while Thaksin was in New York for the UN General Assembly, the Royal Thai Army under General Sonthi Boonyaratglin seized power in a bloodless coup. Thai Rak Thai was dissolved by the Constitutional Court in 2007. Thaksin went into self-imposed exile and was convicted in absentia in 2008 on a conflict-of-interest charge related to a Bangkok land deal.

Despite his absence, allied parties — People's Power Party, then Pheu Thai — kept winning elections. His sister Yingluck Shinawatra served as Prime Minister from 2011 until a 2014 coup. The political cleavage between "red shirt" Thaksin supporters and "yellow shirt" royalist opponents has defined Thai politics for two decades.

Thaksin returned to Thailand in August 2023, the same day Pheu Thai formed a coalition government; his prison sentence was swiftly reduced by royal pardon. He remains one of Southeast Asia's most consequential and polarising political figures.