Exiled Thaksin rallies Thai protesters with online talk show

BANGKOK • One of Thailand's most polarising figures is staging a comeback, rallying young pro-democracy protesters from over 4,800km away in a fresh challenge to military leaders who have held power since 2014.

Despite more than a decade in self-exile following a corruption conviction, Thaksin Shinawatra - a former prime minister and telecoms tycoon - has maintained the support from millions of poor and rural Thais, who have helped him and his allies win the most seats in every general election since 2001.

Now, he has joined an online talk show from Dubai that is surging in popularity among younger citizens with few memories of his five-year stint as prime minister that ended with a 2006 coup.

Thousands of demonstrators marked the anniversary in Bangkok on Sunday in a protest called "cars against tanks" led by former "red shirt" leaders who were aligned with Thaksin over the years.

Every second Tuesday for the past few months, Thaksin has appeared on a live show called Care Talk that has a combined audience of more than 100,000 on Clubhouse, Facebook and YouTube.

It covers a range of topics, with Thaksin criticising the government, boasting about global connections and taking audience questions.

"As a kid back then, I looked up to him and always liked the way he speaks," said 26-year-old rapper Thepparit Imsudsumran, who listens to the show regularly and recently wrote a song called Thaksin that went viral on YouTube. "In this country, sometimes things aren't what they seem," he added. "The majority of people in this country know what the truth is."

Thaksin's growing popularity among younger Thais comes at a precarious time for the royalist military establishment, which over the past two decades has staged two coups and blocked democratic reforms. Now, anger over Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha's handling of the coronavirus is exposing cracks within the ruling party and its elite backers, raising the prospect of an early election that could bolster an opposition led by Thaksin's allies.

Younger voters helped the Future Forward party win the third-largest number of seats in the 2019 election before the group became the latest pro-democracy organisation to be disbanded.

Since then, students have led unprecedented protests calling for Mr Prayut's resignation and reform of the monarchy, the country's most powerful institution. Those student-led protests are largely leaderless, and Thaksin has said he is not directly involved with the gatherings.

Some Future Forward voters like Mr Thepparit are becoming increasingly attracted to Thaksin, who on the show goes by Tony - the name he used while studying in the United States in the 1970s.

"The government is now facing battles on three fronts: the Parliament, the protests and Tony," said Associate Professor Siripan Nogsuan Sawasdee from Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Political Science, noting that Thaksin has been able to draw younger voters recently in a way his allies never could. "Younger voters are the new electorate that every party wants to win."

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