By Thai Newsroom Reporters
SCATHING, RELENTLESS verbal barrages and intermittent, vehement protests will likely prevail over a two-day censure debate on the House floor beginning on the upcoming Monday against Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra.
Though the historic motion launched by the People’s-led opposition bloc was primarily designed to grill the country’s second woman prime minister as the sole target of censure, Paetongtarn, daughter of de facto Pheu Thai boss Thaksin Shinawatra, will not be left alone to respond to varied accusations since some of the Pheu Thai cabinet members were already assigned to take turns to speak in her defence, according to partisan sources.
Though the People’s finally offered to erase the name Thaksin from the context of their censure motion, a number of Pheu Thai MPs will be more than willing to immediately take the floor and belligerently protest any opposition MPs who might probably mention their de facto boss by name during the marathon, heated floor debate.
Thaksin has been invariably accused of virtually pulling the strings of the “puppet” prime minister with her running of the country as well as unlawfully domineering and steering the rank and file of the Pheu Thai, merely viewed as a resurrection of the court-dissolved Thai Rak Thai and People’s Power which he had founded.
“Throughout a couple of days of censure debate, the prime minister would be intermittently caught off-guard, awkwardly, ambiguously or even irrelevantly responding to multiple accusations, let alone to convincingly speak in defence of the (de facto Pheu Thai) boss,” one partisan source said.
The Pheu Thai MPs were more or less obliged to see to it that their de facto party boss will not be mentioned by name in regard to anything about the running of the country by his daughter regardless of the People’s-launched allegations of her complete failure to be very intelligent, practically competent or fairly well-versed to do so in the first place.
The sole factor which landed Paetongtarn the elected premiership and was almost immediately accepted by many people inside and outside of the political arena simply referred to the fact that she is a Shinawatra family member of the de facto Pheu Thai boss/former convict at large who had conditionally returned home from 17 years of self-exile abroad without being put behind bars for a single day to otherwise serve a curtailed, one-year jail sentence and had allegedly staged a six-month-long fake-out as a “critically ill” patient at Police Hospital without literally being so.
Not until the 2023 election in which she had been named one of a trio of partisan contestants for prime minister had Paetongtarn bothered to join the Pheu Thai as a partisan member, let alone to help execute the ruling party.
The censure debate will get started on Monday mid-morning and may not stop until the wee hours of Tuesday to let the MPs go home to rest and come back by mid-morning to resume it without end until nearly midnight. Wednesday’s House session will finally cap it with votes of confidence and votes of no-confidence with the near-certainty of the prime minister surviving, given the fact that she has an army of 321 coalition MPs on her side against a maximum of 179 MPs in the opposition bloc.
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Top: Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra’s image against a background of Parliament meeting chamber. Amarin TV
Insert and Front Page: Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra and leaders of coalition parties at a dinner get-together last evening, March 21, 2025. Photos shared by the Prime Minister on Instagram and published by Naewna
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