BANGKOK, Thailand–Thailand’s main opposition party won a fractious election Sunday, paving the way for the selection of the nation’s first female prime minister and the possible return from exile of her controversial brother.
Several hundred supporters mobbed party headquarters as word sprea
d that the Puea Thai party, led by political novice Yingluck Shinawatra, 44, had won more than 260 of parliament’s 500 seats in preliminary results.
“There is a lot more hard work to do,” she told cheering fans. “There are many things to accomplish to make reconciliation possible.”
Her supporters hope the apparent victory will endure, having seen past elections undermined by judicial decisions, military pressure and parliamentary maneuvers engineered by royalist conservatives.
Yingluck is stand-in for her billionaire brother, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who has called the shots and paid her campaign bills. The controversial Thaksin is in self-imposed exile in Dubai, avoiding a two-year sentence on corruption charges after he was ousted in a 2006 military coup.
“I like Yingluck, and it doesn’t bother me that Thaksin will be the real one running things,” said Sommurk Keawnoi, 51, selling pineapple topped with fiery chili flakes from a wood and glass cart in Bangkok’s Klong Toey area, a Thaksin stronghold.
“Those were good times when he was prime minister,” she added. “I’m just afraid that, with her victory, dark hands will take away our rights again.”
Yingluck, aware of the criticism that she is, in her brother’s words, his “clone,” said Sunday that she took her mandate seriously. “I’ll put the country before me and my family,” she told the local media.
An open question is whether the nation’s power brokers, led by the army and the monarchy, will accept the results after backing incumbent Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s Democrat Party. With 95 percent of the votes counted, his party had won160 seats.
Thailand, a nation of 66 million, has suffered a destructive social schism over the past six years between haves and have-nots. That culminated in street demonstrations and a bloody crackdown in May 2010 with more than 90 people killed, over 1,800 wounded and glitzy shopping centers engulfed in flames.
In an interview broadcast on the Thai PBS network Sunday, Thaksin said he did not feel vengeful, was ready to “forgive all” and favored reconciliation.
Attention now shifts to how the winning party will govern. It’s expected to name a prime minister within a week almost certainly Yingluck and announce its coalition partners within a fortnight. It’s also expected to try to engineer Thaksin’s return to Thailand, a deeply divisive move, perhaps linked to a broader amnesty.
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