Get your free copy of Editor's Digest
FT editor Roula Khalaf picks her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The author is Director of the Asia Pacific Programme at Chatham House.
When 38-year-old Pathontar Shinawatra was sworn in as Thailand's new prime minister last Sunday, her inauguration marked three milestones.
First, she became the youngest prime minister ever in this important Southeast Asian country. Second, she restored the Shinawatra family to power for the first time in a decade after her aunt, Yingluck Shinawatra, was deposed by a judicial ruling in 2014 and her father, Thaksin Shinawatra, the tycoon who once owned Manchester City, was ousted in a coup in 2006. Third, her appointment means that six out of ten Southeast Asian countries are ruled by family dynasties.
Nepotism and cronyism are common in politics around the world, but what is striking in Southeast Asia is the resurgence of political families in both democratic and non-democratic systems, from electoral hotbeds in the Philippines and Indonesia, to partial democracies like Thailand, and one-party states like Laos and Cambodia.
With a population of more than 670 million and the world's fifth-largest economy, Southeast Asia has become a crucible of geopolitical competition between the United States and China, and diplomats and business executives hoping to gain influence and profit here will need to understand these family dynamics if they want to succeed.
Besides Pae Thong Than, four other Southeast Asian countries are led by children of former rulers: Bongbong Marcos of the Philippines, Hun Manet of Cambodia, Sonnexay Siphandon of Laos and King Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei. Indonesia will join this group when Prabowo Subianto becomes president in October. The former son-in-law of longtime dictator Suharto and the son and grandson of Indonesia's leading politicians, Prabowo will have Gibran Rakabumin Raka, son of outgoing President Joko Widodo, as vice president. In Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of founding father Aung San, was the elected leader until she was removed in a 2021 military coup.
The dominance of political families is also reflected in business and local politics, reflecting a broader failure to build strong and effective institutions to distribute power and public goods, and to ensure accountable and transparent governance.
In competitive democracies like Indonesia and the Philippines, the high costs of campaigning and the absence of organized political parties create opportunities for the scions of political families to gain instant name recognition and benefit from large patronage networks.
In authoritarian regimes, powerful families are able to more directly manipulate the political system to serve their own interests.
For example, Pathuntharn would not have become prime minister without the successful efforts of Thai elites to suppress democratic opposition by undermining and then banning the progressive and popular Forward Party.
That doesn't mean, as nepobabies everywhere argue, that their parents should be barred from certain professions, nor does it mean they can't excel at their jobs: family-run conglomerates in Southeast Asia have proven remarkably resilient, surviving the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the 2008 global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.
But their success has often come at the expense of more competitive local and international rivals, forcing Southeast Asian consumers to pay higher prices for their goods and services.Similarly, in the political sphere, the dominance of these clans hampers future competition.
It is important to note that at least in the Philippines and Indonesia, citizens elected their dynastic politicians in largely free and fair elections. Voters appear to have been attracted to the stability of well-known figures at a time when Southeast Asia's economic and geopolitical position is under renewed pressure.
This trend is also easy to understand in the context of the modern history of Southeast Asia, where no other country apart from Thailand was independent before 1945. For better or worse, political families were essential to the creation and development of these young nations.
But they should take nothing for granted. Dynastic legacies may help maintain power, but people judge their leaders by their track record, not their parents. The people of neighbouring Southeast Asia, Bangladesh, showed that when earlier this month they ousted their unpopular prime minister, Sheikh Hasina Wazed, the daughter of the country's founding leader.
