分类： politics

BANGKOK — Decades of polarizing Thai political drama took a new turn on Monday, as former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra walked free from Bangkok’s Klong Prem Central Prison, eight months into a one-year corruption-related sentence. Hundreds of cheering supporters and political allies gathered outside the prison walls to welcome the 76-year-old populist billionaire, who has reshaped Thailand’s political landscape over the past 25 years.

Thaksin’s family, including his daughter Paetongtarn Shinawatra — the former prime minister and one of Thaksin’s three children — arrived hours early to wait for his release. When Thaksin emerged from the prison gate dressed in a white polo shirt and blue trousers, he was immediately embraced by his relatives. Smiling broadly, he walked through the crowd of supporters, who chanted “we love Thaksin” and presented him with red roses, a long-standing symbol of his political movement. He left the prison compound without addressing waiting reporters.

Roughly an hour after his release, Thaksin arrived at his private residence in western Bangkok. In live footage streamed by local outlet Thairath News, he rolled down his car window to greet a small group of well-wishers gathered outside his gate. When pressed by reporters shouting questions about his time in custody, he joked, “I was in hibernation, I can’t remember anything now.”

Thaksin’s political career traces a dramatic arc that fundamentally split Thai society. A successful telecommunications tycoon, he launched his own political party in 1998, won election in 2001, and made history as the first elected prime minister to complete a full four-year term. His signature policies — including a universal national healthcare program and infrastructure investments connecting remote rural regions — earned him fierce loyalty among working-class and poor communities across northern and northeastern Thailand. But his outsized popularity and blunt governing style created deep, enduring rifts with Thailand’s established power blocs: urban elites, royalist factions, and the military. These tensions boiled over in 2006, when a military coup ousted Thaksin while he was traveling abroad. He spent 15 years in self-imposed exile, arguing that the judicial cases filed against him were political persecution carried out by his opponents.

The 2006 coup set off nearly 20 years of intermittent political upheaval and deadly clashes between pro- and anti-Thaksin factions, even as successive iterations of his political machine repeatedly won general elections. Thaksin only returned to Thailand in 2023, as his latest political party, Pheu Thai, negotiated to form a new ruling government. He was immediately taken into custody to face the long-standing abuse of power convictions that had been handed down in absentia, which included charges of using his office to benefit his personal business empire and improperly approving a state lottery project that caused public financial losses.

Originally sentenced to eight years in prison, Thaksin saw his term commuted to one year by King Maha Vajiralongkorn. For months, he was allowed to serve his sentence in a private suite at Bangkok’s Police Hospital on medical grounds, sparking widespread public anger over claims of unfair preferential treatment. In September 2025, the Supreme Court ordered him to transfer to the general prison population to serve out the remainder of his term.

Last month, a Justice Ministry review panel approved Thaksin’s parole application alongside more than 900 other eligible inmates, justifying the decision by citing his good behavior behind bars, his advanced age, and the low risk he would reoffend. Following his release, Thaksin will serve a four-month probation period, during which he is required to live at his registered Bangkok address, wear an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet, and check in regularly with probation authorities.

Thaksin’s release comes at a turbulent moment for his political bloc. Paetongtarn, his daughter, became Thailand’s youngest prime minister in 2024, but was removed from office by the Constitutional Court in August 2025 after an leaked recording of a controversial phone call with former Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen was made public. In the most recent 2025 general election, Pheu Thai placed third overall, weakening the party’s position in coalition negotiations.

At 76 years old, after two decades of self-imposed exile and eight months behind bars, former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra has walked out of a Bangkok prison, tagged with an electronic ankle monitoring bracelet to serve the remainder of his one-year sentence for corruption and abuse of power convictions tied to his 2001-2006 tenure in office. His release dominated national headlines this week, and despite repeated assurances from Thaksin’s long-dominant Pheu Thai Party that the former leader will step away from frontline politics, widespread media and public speculation continues to swirl over what influence he may still wield over Thailand’s fractious political sphere.

Thaksin’s outsized impact on Thai politics over the past quarter-century is impossible to overstate. A charismatic, self-made billionaire who won a landslide election in 2001, he rapidly reshaped the country’s policy landscape, building a deeply loyal base of working-class and rural supporters while drawing fierce opposition from Thailand’s established conservative and royalist institutions. Even after a 2006 military coup ousted him from power, political parties aligned with Thaksin continued to win every subsequent national election – a streak that triggered repeated interventions from the courts, mass violent street protests, and a second military coup in 2014.

For years after 2014, Thaksin operated his political movement from exile abroad, until a high-profile 2023 “grand bargain” with his long-time conservative opponents allowed him to return to Thailand to resume informal leadership of his party after it returned to government. Despite public claims that he intended to retire to spend time with family, political observers have long noted Thaksin has repeatedly shown an unwillingness to cede control of the movement he built.

This release, however, comes at a moment of profound change for Thai politics that could mark the definitive end of Thaksin’s decades-long dominance. Just months after his 2023 homecoming, Thailand’s Supreme Court ruled that Thaksin’s six-month stay in a police hospital shortly after his return was a deliberate ploy to avoid serving his prison sentence, and ordered him jailed last September. The ruling came only two weeks after Thailand’s Constitutional Court dismissed Thaksin’s daughter Paetongtarn Shinawatra from the prime ministership, over a leaked private phone call with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen regarding bilateral border dispute negotiations.

During Thaksin’s time in prison, Pheu Thai suffered its worst ever electoral performance in the country’s February general election. The party fell to third place, outperformed by both the reformist People’s Party and the conservative Bhumjaithai Party, which capitalized on a surge in nationalist sentiment following a border conflict with Cambodia. Reduced to a junior coalition partner in the new administration, Pheu Thai now holds far less political sway than it did for most of the past two decades.

Political analyst Ken Lohatepanont notes that Thaksin is re-entering public life in a Thailand unrecognizable from the political order he once dominated. “Thaksin emerges from prison to a new political environment,” he explained. “Pheu Thai has been sidelined as just a mid-sized party. You can never count Thaksin out, but the challenge that he and his Party face is of a different magnitude to those he has faced in the past. Pheu Thai will have to decide whether a public comeback for Thaksin will boost the party, or whether the party might be better served by placing the spotlight on their newer generation leaders.”

Debate remains ongoing over why the 2023 grand bargain between Thaksin and Thailand’s royalist conservative establishment collapsed so rapidly. Some observers question whether conservative factions always intended to use judicial rulings to dismantle the Pheu Thai government, pointing to the earlier court dismissal of Pheu Thai’s first prime ministerial pick on a minor technicality. Others argue that the collapse was triggered by Thaksin’s own refusal to stay on the political sidelines, and his insistence on advancing his own policy and business agenda that clashed with conservative interests.

Regardless of the cause, decades of conflict have left irreconcilable mistrust between Thaksin and Thailand’s conservative power brokers. Even if Thaksin still seeks a return to prominent public office, institutional barriers will almost certainly block any such path. For 25 years, Thai politics was defined by the battle over Thaksin’s legacy and influence. Political analysts broadly agree that the Thaksin era is now all but certainly over.

In one of the most shocking political upsets in modern Indian electoral history, Tamil actor-turned-politician Chandrasekhar Joseph Vijay — universally known by his fan nickname Thalapathy (Commander) Vijay — has led his newly formed political party Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) to become the single-largest faction in Tamil Nadu’s 234-seat state assembly, defying every pre-election prediction and upending the southern state’s decades-old political order.

The stunning outcome was foreshadowed by one underdog race that encapsulated TVK’s entire electoral surprise. When 42-year-old meat shop owner Madhar Badhurudeen, a first-time TVK candidate, filed to run in the Madurai Central constituency — a Hindu-majority seat anchored by the iconic Meenakshi Amman temple — no political observer gave him a shot at victory. A Muslim candidate from a non-political, working-class background, Badhurudeen ran a low-key grassroots campaign with no high-profile celebrity rallies, no visits from party leader Vijay himself, and none of the glitzy, high-decibel campaign events that defined his rivals’ bids.

His opponents were political heavyweights: the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) fielded sitting state minister and senior party leader Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, while the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) — the two entrenched regional parties that have dominated Tamil Nadu politics for decades — tapped well-known actor-filmmaker Sundar C. Both opponents held massive, star-studded processions and drew thousands to public rallies, leaving Badhurudeen’s quiet door-to-door outreach invisible to most traditional political analysts. Yet when results were announced last week, Badhurudeen defeated both rivals by a comfortable margin of more than 19,000 votes.

“My only strength was our leader Vijay and the party’s electoral symbol, the whistle,” Badhurudeen told reporters after his win. “I campaigned on our leader’s pledge of a corruption-free government, and that was enough.”

Badhurudeen’s upset was far from an isolated anomaly. Across the state, 108 TVK candidates — the vast majority of them political newcomers — won their seats, leaving the party just 10 seats short of a full majority. After days of post-election negotiations to secure a governing mandate, Vijay was sworn in as Tamil Nadu’s chief minister on Sunday, closing out a political journey that began just two years ago when he launched TVK after decades as one of Tamil cinema’s biggest box office draws.

The question on every political observer’s mind after the upset is simple: how did a first-time political party, led by a celebrity who campaigned in person for less than three weeks total, pull off such a decisive victory against two well-established political machines?

Vijay’s campaign faced major disruptions long before election day: he paused all campaigning for more than two months after a fatal crowd crush at one of his September 2024 rallies killed dozens of attendees, and dozens more scheduled public events were canceled over what the party cited as logistical constraints and time shortages. The answer, experts say, lies not in traditional ground campaigning, but in a revolutionary digital strategy that rewrote the rules of Indian electoral politics.

“This was almost certainly the first election in India won almost entirely through social media,” explained Anup Chandrasekharan, a Bangalore-based independent media strategist. “Vijay’s supporters didn’t just use digital platforms — they ushered in a full digital revolution in Indian campaigning.”

Unlike traditional Indian election campaigns, which rely on massive ground rallies, door-to-door canvassing, printed banners and endless offline outreach, TVK turned a pre-existing network of 85,000 Vijay fan clubs — built over the actor’s 30-year film career — into a coordinated, 24/7 online campaign army. When Vijay launched his party in 2024, this massive grassroots fan network seamlessly transitioned into an organized political operation focused on digital outreach.

Vijay himself broke with traditional political norms: he gave no national media interviews, held no press conferences, and delivered far shorter public speeches than rival party leaders. Instead, he communicated directly with supporters through social platforms, and every public appearance was quickly repackaged into bite-sized, shareable content by the party’s well-funded IT wing and thousands of volunteer supporters. Clips of his speeches, edited selfie videos, and campaign messaging were cut into Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, then shared across hundreds of thousands of WhatsApp groups and social feeds, reaching millions of voters without a single expensive ground rally.

One edited selfie video of Vijay from a Madurai party conference amassed nearly 90 million views in just 24 hours, a level of organic reach no traditional campaign ad could match. For years, Vijay built his film brand portraying a crusader against corruption, injustice and inequality, championing the rights of underprivileged and marginalized communities — a narrative that translated seamlessly to his political campaign, resonating with voters hungry for change after decades of rule by the two established Dravidian parties.

The strategy proved particularly effective with young Gen Z voters and women, who turned out in large numbers to back TVK and its anti-corruption platform. Unlike many new political entrants in India, TVK’s victory came without widespread allegations of voter intimidation or financial graft, a rare feat in a political landscape long dominated by money, caste and religious identity politics.

Still, experts caution that the digital-first model that delivered electoral success will not be enough to govern effectively. “This model worked because Vijay is a new entrant with no political baggage,” Chandrasekharan noted. “Now that he is in power, he has to deliver results, and he needs to strengthen his on-the-ground party structure — you can’t govern solely from the digital world.”

Critics have also raised questions about Vijay’s lack of formal administrative and political experience as he takes on the role of chief minister. But TVK leaders reject those concerns, pointing to the 1967 election that first brought the DMK to power in Tamil Nadu, when the party was also a new, untested political force.

“What kind of experience did DMK have when they took power in 1967?” Badhurudeen said. “Our goal is to deliver a clean, transparent administration, and our leader is exactly the person to do that.”

There is no question that Vijay has made history: he took on two of India’s most entrenched regional political machines and single-handedly upended the state’s political order, thanks to a revolutionary digital campaign strategy that will likely reshape how Indian elections are fought in years to come. But as post-inauguration celebrations wind down, the reality of governing is setting in. For Thalapathy Vijay and his army of digital campaigners, the real test of their political project is only just beginning.

Allegations that Israel established a covert military base inside Iraqi territory during its recent conflict with Iran have triggered a political firestorm in Baghdad, prompting Iraq’s parliament to launch a formal investigation and summon the country’s defence and interior ministers for questioning.

According to reporting from The New Arab, the parliamentary probe will not be limited to cabinet-level security leaders. Senior national security figures will also be called to testify as lawmakers work to unpack the veracity of multiple independent claims about the hidden outpost, which was reportedly built in Iraq’s western desert.

The first public claim of the base emerged over the weekend from The Wall Street Journal, which reported that Israeli special forces constructed the covert installation in the weeks preceding the outbreak of the Iran-Israel conflict in February. The site, the outlet stated, was purpose-built to support Israeli air operations targeting Iran. When Iraqi military units stumbled on the location nearly two months after construction, the outlet added, Israeli forces launched an attack on the approaching Iraqi contingent.

Israeli outlet Maariv followed with additional reporting the next day, confirming that the forward outpost was designed to serve a critical contingency role: hosting Israeli commando and search-and-rescue teams on standby to extract downed Israeli aircrew from Iranian territory if needed.

Independent open-source intelligence group Faytuks Network has corroborated these claims with satellite imagery captured in March, which shows a temporary makeshift airstrip carved into a dried lakebed in Iraq’s western Najaf desert. The imagery clearly shows fixed-wing aircraft and prefabricated temporary structures at the site, according to the group’s analysis, which was publicly posted to social media on May 10, 2026.

This evidence aligns with on-the-ground reports from early March, when Iraqi state media confirmed that one Iraqi soldier was killed in armed clashes with an unidentified foreign force in the desert region between the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Iraqi forces had been dispatched to the area that day to investigate unconfirmed reports of a military airdrop carried out by multiple unidentified helicopters.

In comments to The New Arab, a senior parliamentary official confirmed that Iraqi national security authorities initially assumed the unknown force operating in the desert was part of the U.S.-led international counter-ISIS coalition, and did not immediately move to expel or confront the group. Multiple anonymous security sources have told Arab media outlets that the site is no longer occupied by Israeli personnel as of the latest reports.

The revelations have sparked widespread public and political anger across Iraq, with growing cross-party demands for the Iraqi government to deliver a full public explanation and hold accountable any actors responsible for violating Iraqi sovereignty. Prominent Iraqi MP Raed al-Maliki has publicly leveled blame at the United States, accusing Washington of enabling the Israeli operation by granting Israel free access to Iraqi airspace during the conflict and ordering Iraqi air defense radar systems to be shut down.

“The United States handed Iraqi airspace to the entity during the war and ordered radar systems to be shut down. Now it has become clear that Iraqi territory was also used to establish a secret intelligence centre or base for the Zionist entity,” al-Maliki said in a public statement.

As of press time, the federal Iraqi government has not issued any official public comment on the allegations or the impending parliamentary investigation.

An explosive investigative report aired on Israel’s Channel 13 has pulled back the curtain on sweeping, deadly rules of engagement Israeli forces received for their 2023 ground operation in Gaza, with serving and former soldiers confirming that troops were ordered to kill any male encountered on sight, regardless of age, and told to treat all civilians as potential threats.

The testimony was collected directly by Iris Haim, whose son Yotam—one of three Israeli captives wrongfully killed by Israeli forces in Gaza City’s Shujaiya neighborhood in December 2023—was among the victims of the mistaken attack. In an account that has upended official military narratives, an anonymous soldier who admitted to opening fire on the three captives described the explicit standing orders he and his unit received. “A man, no matter what age, don’t play games with it; kill immediately,” the soldier said, adding that commanders even instructed troops to use lethal judgment against women and children if they perceived any threat, with similar protocols applied to working animals like donkeys in the area.

The December 2023 killing of the three captives sparked immediate international and domestic outcry, because the hostages were unarmed, shirtless, waving a white flag, and posed no visible threat to Israeli troops when they were shot. The newly released testimonies lay bare a stark gap between on-the-ground orders and the Israeli military’s official post-incident investigation. Per the soldiers’ accounts, no ceasefire order was issued in the moments before the shooting—directly contradicting the military’s official claim that all troops received a command to halt fire.

Recounting the fatal encounter, the soldier who participated in the shooting told Haim he operated under the mindset drilled into him by training: “I fire 500 bullets a minute. I blow things up. I don’t care. I’m here to kill terrorists.” When he spotted the three men approaching, he opened fire, believing them to be enemy fighters. After he hit two, his weapon jammed, and another soldier stepped in to kill the surviving captive, who was later identified as Yotam Haim. The investigation further confirmed that a brigade commander had instructed Yotam to approach the Israeli outpost, only for troops to open fire the moment he emerged.

In a damning exchange with Iris Haim, the brigade commander overseeing the operation explicitly confirmed the lethal policy. When asked if even unarmed people were targeted, the commander replied: “Of course, we need to kill him – yes, even if he is completely unarmed.” He added that troops were ordered to kill any approaching threat rather than attempt to take them into custody, a framing that Iris Haim said amounted to an order to “kill every person walking on two legs.”

A second soldier echoed those claims, telling investigators that all Gazans were framed as potential risks from the start of the operation. “Even an old man can blow himself up with an explosive device. The protocol was to shoot them,” he said, confirming that there were multiple documented cases of civilians waving white flags being shot on sight. The soldier added that the senior commander in charge of the captive shooting had publicly stated that distinguishing between Hamas fighters and civilian non-combatants in Gaza was impossible—yet that same commander was later promoted by Israeli Army Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, with military officials praising him as “an outstanding officer.”

Raviv Drucker, the investigative journalist who led the Channel 13 report, accused the Israeli military of carrying out a deliberate cover-up in its official investigation into the captive deaths. He said families of the deceased captives had pushed for a full, transparent inquiry “to receive a real investigation, and not what was presented to them, which in their eyes, and in mine as well, was a cover-up and a whitewash.”

The investigation also uncovered new details of missed warnings that could have prevented the killings. Five days before the shooting, Israeli forces fired a missile at a northern Gaza building where the three captives were hiding, after an exchange of fire with Hamas fighters nearby. The captives survived the strike and moved through residential areas of Shujaiya, hanging handwritten signs requesting help from Israeli forces. But according to the report, military intelligence ignored on-the-ground reports of the captives’ presence, failing to pass the information to frontline troops.

The killings of the three captives fit into a broader pattern of Israeli military actions harming Israeli hostages held in Gaza, the report notes. Of the 251 people taken captive during the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on southern Israel, 85 died in captivity or were killed before they could be rescued, under circumstances that remain heavily contested. While the Israeli government has repeatedly denied or declined to comment on accusations that its operations have killed captive Israelis, multiple independent reports confirm that Israeli military actions have directly and indirectly caused the deaths of many hostages. Israeli newspaper Maariv even reported in October 2025 that, per anonymous Israeli official sources, dozens of captives were killed by Israeli attacks, particularly in the chaotic early stages of the war.

From the first day of the conflict, the Israeli military activated the controversial Hannibal Directive, a longstanding military protocol that orders troops to fire on captives and abductors alike to prevent captives from being taken away, even if that puts the lives of the captives at extreme risk.

As of 2025, Israeli military operations in Gaza have killed more than 72,700 Palestinians, according to local health officials, with 850 additional deaths recorded after a ceasefire was declared in October 2025. Thousands more Palestinians remain unaccounted for, and are presumed buried under the rubble of destroyed residential and infrastructure across the enclave.