Today (August 16th), the lower house of the Thai parliament held a meeting to vote on the candidate for Prime Minister. The leader of the Phet Thai Party nominated by the Phet Thai Party and its ruling coalition, Bedon Tan Sri Lanka, received over half of the support and was elected as the new Prime Minister of Thailand.
After being elected, she will become the second female Prime Minister in Thai history and also the youngest Prime Minister.
On August 14th, there was a sudden change in the political situation in Thailand. The country's Constitutional Court ruled that Prime Minister Saita's nomination of someone with a record of violating the law as a minister during the cabinet reshuffle violated relevant constitutional provisions, and he was dismissed from his position as Prime Minister with immediate effect. Saita was elected as the Prime Minister in August last year and was dismissed less than a year after taking office.
The verdict of the Thai Constitutional Court is final and cannot be appealed, which means there is no room for maneuver in the dismissal of Saita. This is less than a year since Seta took office. As a successful entrepreneur, Saita was once expected by the Thai people and the international community to "boost Thailand's sluggish economy", but now he has been unexpectedly dismissed.
It is worth noting that the recently dismissed Thai Prime Minister Seta has close ties with Bedongtan. According to The Paper, Saita is recognized as a close friend of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra (Thaksin's sister), and officially joined the Thai Communist Party at the end of 2022. In April 2023, he officially resigned from his position as CEO of Shangsi Rui and devoted himself to politics, serving as the Chief Advisor of Beidongdan.
In 1986, Bedongdan was born into the well-known Chinese family of the Shinawatra family in Thailand. His ancestral home was Fengshun County, Guangdong Province, China, and his surname was Qiu. He immigrated to Thailand around the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty (1860s) and was one of the largest families in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Beidongdan graduated from the Department of Political Science at Chulalongkorn University and later studied International Hotel Management at the University of Surrey in the UK. She entered the Thai political arena in 2021 as a political advisor to the Thai Communist Party. In March 2022, the Thai Party announced the appointment of Bedongdan as the leader of the "Thai Family".
Bedongdan is currently the leader of the Thai Party. In the 2023 general election, Bedongdan is one of the candidates for the Thai Party Prime Minister and the youngest daughter of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.
Bedongdan has not been involved in politics for long. In 2019, she joined the Phet Thai Party and was elected as a member of the lower house of the Thai parliament in 2020. In 2021, she entered the Thai political arena and became a political advisor to the Phet Thai Party.
Thaksin Shinawatra is the first democratically elected prime minister in Thailand to complete his entire term. Although he was forced to step down in a coup in 2006, he still has a huge influence in the Thai political arena.
Frequent power transitions will inevitably affect the sustained advancement of Thailand's economic and social policies. In its latest report in July, the World Bank lowered its economic growth forecast for Thailand in 2024 to 2.4%, down from the previous expectation of 2.8%. The adjustment was mainly due to lower than expected export and public investment performance at the beginning of the year.