How Thailand’s Anutin Charnvirakul rose from cannabis crusader to prime minister

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By Devjyot Ghoshal

BANGKOK (Reuters) -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, a week after a court decision dismissed Paetongtarn as premier 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 premiership, 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 as Pheu Thai’s 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 preserve 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.

HIGH-FLIER

Born to an influential politician-businessman, Anutin studied at an all-boys private school in Bangkok before heading to university in the United States for an engineering degree. 

In 1990, he joined his father’s construction firm, Sino-Thai, and served as its president before stepping away from the private sector to enter government as deputy minister of public health under Thaksin in 2004.

Thaksin’s Thai Rak Thai party was dissolved in 2007 by a court order that also handed a five-year ban to Anutin, who returned to politics as leader of Bhumjaithai in 2012.

In the decade since, Anutin has leveraged not only the connections of Bhumjaithai founder Newin Chidchob to shore up provincial support, but also his own influence with the conservative elite to place his party in successive governments.

Since 2023, he served as interior minister in two administrations led by Pheu Thai prime ministers.

“Bhumjaithai has been part of the government for many, many years, almost in every single cabinet, and usually controls lucrative ministries,” said Napon.

Anutin’s path to power, however, has required the support of the People’s Party, the successor of the progressive Move Forward that he blocked from forming the government in 2023 but will now provide outside support to Bhumjaithai’s coalition.

“We know that the People’s Party has cooperated and made sacrifices in finding a solution for Thailand during a period of crises,” Anutin told reporters on Wednesday, after securing the endorsement.

Outside of business and politics, Anutin’s interests include collecting Buddhist amulets and recreational flying, which he sometimes uses to facilitate emergency organ donations.

With Thailand’s stuttering economy facing serious headwinds, tensions with neighbouring Cambodia on knife-edge after a deadly border war and the spectre of more political turmoil, an ability to handle turbulence could prove useful in Anutin’s new job.

(Reporting by Devjyot Ghoshal; Editing by Lincoln Feast and Clarence Fernandez.)