BANGKOK: Anutin Charnvirakul waited just hours after the June leak of a phone call that would bring down Thailand’s prime minister before kicking into higher gear his manoeuvring to take power.
The veteran politician swiftly walked out of the ruling coalition led by the Pheu Thai party’s Paetongtarn Shinawatra, made an initial outreach to the main opposition, and stood back to bide his time.
On Friday (Sep 5), a week after a court decision dismissed Paetongtarn as prime minister and triggered a political maelstrom, parliament overwhelmingly voted to elect Anutin as the next prime minister.
Anutin himself abstained from voting and, having secured a decisive win, received telephone calls and posed for photographs with his lawmakers on the floor of the house.
The 58-year-old’s rise has been decades in the making, starting with his entry into politics with the Thai Rak Thai party founded by Paetongtarn’s billionaire father, Thaksin Shinawatra.
In recent years, Anutin’s growing influence in Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy has been mainly wielded through the Bhumjaithai party, a relative newcomer in Thai politics with roots in the farming communities of the lower northeast region.
For two election cycles, in 2019 and 2023, pundits tipped Anutin among candidates for the prime ministership, most likely seen as leading a coalition government, given his pull across party lines.
That did not happen, and Anutin rose instead to prominence as health minister for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and championing Thailand’s legalisation of cannabis in 2022.
“I am younger, more fresh, and I understand politics in a democratic system,” he told Reuters in 2023, making no bones about his ambition for the top job and expectations of a big win.
Bhumjaithai secured only 70 of the 500 seats on offer but, after helping to block the election-winning Move Forward party from taking power, it teamed up with Pheu Thai as its junior partner to form a government that held power for two years.
Anutin and his party are a rare bridge spanning powerful family clans that dominate provincial politics and sections of the influential royalist-conservative establishment, said analyst Napon Jatusripitak.
“He is very much a pragmatic politician, cut from the same cloth as Thaksin Shinawatra,” Napon, a visiting fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, said of Anutin, an avowed royalist committed to preserving the revered monarchy.
“Now, he has positioned his own party in a way that places it as the most credible guardian of conservative interest in Thailand.”
An unrelenting battle between the conservative establishment and populist parties backed by Thaksin has defined Thailand’s politics, triggering military coups and court verdicts that unseated six elected prime ministers in the last 25 years.
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