Bangkok, Thailand – A court is poised to decide whether Thailand’s most consequential and controversial political figure of the past 25 years, Thaksin Shinawatra, insulted the country’s revered monarchy, a crime that can land a culprit in jail for up to 15 years.
The charge, under Thailand’s strict “lese-majeste” royal defamation law, stems from an interview the 76-year-old business tycoon and former prime minister gave to a South Korean newspaper in 2015 regarding a military coup that toppled his sister and then-Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014.
Though holding no official role in government, Thaksin remains a towering figure bearing over Thailand’s stormy politics, and the verdict on Friday will test the state of his long-fraught relationship with the country’s powerful royalist establishment.
“The prosecution is of great political significance,” said Verapat Pariyawong, a Thai law and politics scholar at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London.
“If found innocent, Mr Thaksin would rely on the verdict as proof that he has always been a loyalist, contrary to the accusations by his political opponents which inflamed conflicts over the past two decades,” Verapat told Al Jazeera.
A guilty verdict, on the other hand, could “trigger a new round of political conflicts”, he said.
“Some would see it as a breakdown of the so-called grand compromise that paved the way for Mr Thaksin’s return to Thailand, and undoubtedly many will link the guilty verdict to other pending major court decisions not just against Mr Thaksin but also his daughter and suspended Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra,” he added.
After 15 years in self-imposed exile, Thaksin returned to Thailand in 2023.
That lengthy absence from Thailand helped him to avoid a prison sentence on a prior corruption charge, though he was still forced to complete a commuted term in custody on his return home.
His latest tribulations stem from a royal defamation charge in June 2024, and he is also on trial for allegedly faking ill health in order to serve his sentence for corruption outside of jail.
Thaksin’s daughter and currently the country’s suspended prime minister, Paetongtarn, is being prosecuted for an alleged breach of ethics over a leaked phone call with Cambodia’s former prime minister and strongman Hun Sen.
A court suspended Paetongtarn from her duties as premier on ethical grounds last month after Hun Sen leaked their phone conversation, in which the Thai prime minister spoke reverentially to the Cambodian leader.
During the call, Paetongtarn referred to Hun Sen as “uncle” and criticised a Thai army commander.
Her political adversaries and other people said it was unbecoming of a Thai premier to have addressed a foreign leader so deferentially, and criticising the military is also a red line in a country where the politically powerful armed forces are held in high esteem.
A court is due to rule in Paetongtarn’s case on August 29, a verdict which could see her removed from office permanently.
Power player
Thaksin’s path to the pinnacle of Thai politics started modestly, with a stretch in the national police force beginning in the early 1970s.
With the help of a government scholarship, he earned a master’s degree and then a doctorate in criminal justice in the United States before returning to public service in Thailand and resigning from the police force as a lieutenant colonel in 1987.
Leveraging his professional contacts, Thaksin tried his hand at a number of business ventures before striking gold in telecommunications, founding and, in time, building his Shin Corp into an industry leader.
It also launched Thaksin onto Thailand’s richest list.
Last month, Forbes ranked Thaksin 11th among the country’s wealthiest families or people, with a personal net worth of $2.1bn.
In the 1990s, Thaksin started parlaying his business success into a political career, founding his first of many parties by the end of the decade.
On the back of a populist platform that promised affordable healthcare and debt relief, he landed in the prime minister’s office with a resounding general election win in 2001 and another in 2005.
But mounting scandals cut his second four-year term short.
Amid accusations of corruption over the $1.9bn sale of Shin Corp and an unrelated land deal that prompted mass protests, the Thai military removed Thaksin and his government in a 2006 coup.
A Thai court convicted him over the land deal the next year. To avoid jail, he fled into self-imposed exile in 2008.
Wanwichit Boonprong, a Rangsit University lecturer, says Thaksin had made powerful enemies within the country’s military – a force that has grown accustomed to managing its internal affairs largely independent of the government – by trying to steer the appointment and transfer of high-ranking officers.
By seeming to meddle in the military’s work, Wanwichit told Al Jazeera, Thaksin raised fears that he was bent on both “undermining the military and weakening the monarchy”.
The military has long prided itself as the ultimate protector of the Thai monarchy, a touchstone of the country’s influential conservative movement.
Thaksin also pulled off the rare feat in 2005 of winning enough seats in the House of Representatives to form a government without the need for any coalition partners, making him uncommonly potent as a political force.
That popularity scared his critics, says Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang, an assistant professor at Chulalongkorn University.
“That popularity, combined with his quick and outspoken manner, raised a lot of people’s suspicion that he might want to or he might try to compete with King Bhumibol [Adulyadej],” he said.
While there was little, if any, proof to back that up, Khemthong said, “it became a very convenient tool to mobilise people” against Thaksin.
‘Super active’
But even in exile overseas, Thaksin continued to dominate Thai politics.
Parties tied to the Shinawatra family kept winning elections and forming governments, only to be thwarted by the military or the courts each time.
With a prison sentence hanging over him, the tech mogul stayed abroad for 15 years, until returning to Bangkok to cheering crowds on August 22, 2023.
Before leaving the airport, Thaksin ostentatiously prostrated himself before a portrait of the country’s new king, Maha Vajiralongkorn, son of the late King Bhumibol.
The very same day, the Shinawatras’s latest party, Pheu Thai, secured the premiership for its candidate, Srettha Thavisin, by backing out of a planned coalition with the more progressive Move Forward party, which had won that year’s general election.
Pheu Thai rejected speculation that it had struck a “grand bargain” with the conservative establishment by pulling away from Move Forward, which had campaigned on reining in the military and the monarchy’s powers, in exchange for Thaksin’s safe return.
However, only nine days later, King Vajiralongkorn commuted Thaksin’s prison sentence from eight years to one, and he was out on parole within months. He had also spent his entire six months in custody in a private room in the luxury wing of a state hospital.
Now, with Thaksin on the brink of another conviction that could again send him to jail, the “grand bargain” is seen to be fraying.
“A lot of people understand that when Thaksin came back he would lay low, that he was allowed to come back but he wasn’t allowed to be politically active, he should stay at home, be quiet. But instead of that he was super active,” said Chulalongkorn University’s Khemthong.
Despite having no official role in the Pheu Thai party or the government it now leads, Thaksin has spent little time out of the spotlight since returning home less than two years ago – proposing grand policy prescriptions at public fora, touring constituencies with reporters in tow, conferring with domestic and international leaders alike.
“So, a lot of people speculate that the [defamation] charge was to put more control over him, to control his behaviour, his political activism,” Khemthong said.
Thaksin’s continued high-profile lifestyle has also led to the popular belief that he, not his daughter, is still the real power behind the party, and by extension the government.
“Everyone knows that Thaksin is the spiritual leader and the real owner of the Pheu Thai Party,” said Rangsit University’s Wanwichit.
“Using this [defamation] case is akin to trying to keep Thaksin in check in the conservative power play,” and amounts to insisting that “he must obey the conservatives’ established guidelines,” Wanwichit added.
‘Court battle’
Critics of Thailand’s royal defamation law, or of how the courts use it, say it has long been swung like a cudgel against threats – real or imagined – to the conservative establishment’s political power and privilege.
The law, under Section 112 of the Criminal Code, prescribes up to 15 years in jail for anyone who “defames, insults or threatens” the king, queen, heir apparent or regent.
But Verapat, of SOAS, says many have “fallen victim” to the courts’ “expansive interpretation” of the law.
In January 2024, the country’s Constitutional Court ruled that the Move Forward party had breached the law by promoting a bill that proposed limits on how it could be used.
The panel of judges accused the party of harbouring a hidden agenda to undermine the country’s constitutional monarchy and ordered Move Forward to disband as a political movement.
When thousands of protesters took to the streets of Bangkok through much of 2020, calling on the military-aligned government at the time to step down, their list of demands grew to include reforms meant to rein in the monarchy’s alleged influence over politics in the military’s favour.
Since then, more than 280 people have been charged under Section 112, according to Thai Lawyers for Human Rights, a local advocacy group.
Among the most prominent of the 2020 protesters was lawyer Arnon Nampa, who has been sentenced to a cumulative 27 years and eight months following his 10th conviction on a royal defamation charge in July.
Thai Lawyers for Human Rights has called the use of the law “a form of violence against those who exercise their right to freedom of expression”.
The defamation case against Thaksin, which is based on a 10-year-old interview in which he criticised no one strictly covered by Section 112, fits into that same, expansive “modus operandi”, Chulalongkorn University’s Khemthong said.
Whichever way the verdict goes on Friday, analysts say the fallout for Thaksin and the Shinawatra family is unlikely to be immediately known, as either side can and probably will appeal.
Khemthong said the case against Thaksin could continue to drag out for months, if not a year or more.
Rangsit University’s Wanwichit concurred.
“The appeals court battle will likely continue regardless of the verdict,” he said.