BANGKOK — 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, a former prime minister.
Several hundred supporters mobbed party headquarters as word spread 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 a 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.
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 won 160 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.
