A Bangkok Podcast Named Thailand's PM. He Lasted 11 Months.

On August 22, 2023, Thailand's parliament ended nearly three months of political deadlock and elected real estate developer Srettha Thavisin as the country's 30th prime minister. Eight days later, when the International Community School of Bangkok's student podcast, Students Incorporated, returned from summer break to open its second season, co-hosts Rebecca and Premi read that news to their listeners as a routine headline, sandwiched between a state TikTok ban and a tourism update. They had no way of knowing they were reporting on a government that would not survive its first year in office, the opening act of a stretch that has since cost Thailand three prime ministers in three years.

A Season Premiere With an Unlikely Scoop

Episode 33, titled "We Know You've Missed Us," is mostly what a season premiere is supposed to be: introductions. Rebecca and Premi take over as co-hosts and script writers. Patience signs on as producer and booking agent. Chanyi joins as designer, and Yanhao as tech engineer and headline writer. The back half of the episode is a game of two truths and one lie, played for laughs between two of the new hosts.

But before any of that, the show does what it does every week: a short news roundup, read cold, no analysis attached. That week's three items were New York restricting TikTok on state government devices, joining roughly three dozen other states citing data-privacy concerns; Thailand's tourism sector rebounding hard enough that hotels were hiring again; and Thailand's parliament, after months of stalemate, finally electing a prime minister.

Of the three, the last one is the story that kept moving long after the episode aired.

Thailand is seeing a growth in tourists once again, based on the number of hotel bookings.

Why It Took Three Months to Get There

The deadlock the students referenced wasn't a minor procedural delay. Thailand's general election on May 14, 2023, produced a clear winner: the progressive Move Forward Party, led by Pita Limjaroenrat, took roughly 14 million votes and 151 House seats, more than any other party. Under a constitutional provision written by the military junta that had ruled Thailand since a 2014 coup, though, the prime minister needed a majority across both chambers of parliament combined: the elected 500-seat House and a 250-seat Senate the military itself had appointed. Pita's coalition controlled only 312 of the 750 combined seats, and on July 13, 2023, the Senate blocked his nomination in the first round of voting; a second attempt was blocked as well, as The Conversation and Time reported at the time.

With Move Forward locked out, Pita's former coalition partner, the Pheu Thai party, associated with the family of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, broke away and built a new coalition, this time including parties aligned with the military establishment it had spent years opposing. Its compromise candidate was Srettha Thavisin, a political outsider. On August 22, a joint sitting of parliament elected him with 482 votes in favor, comfortably clearing the roughly 376-vote threshold required, according to CNBC's report on the vote. It was a number close enough to what the ICS Bangkok students cited on air that week that their report holds up well against the historical record.

The Man Behind the Numbers

Srettha Thavisin was not a career politician. He co-founded the property developer Sansiri in 1988 and built it into one of Thailand's largest real estate companies, a track record that made him a plausible "get the economy moving" candidate for a country whose tourism-dependent economy was still climbing out of a pandemic-era hole. Pheu Thai leaned on that business résumé heavily in selling him to a fractured parliament as a stabilizing, technocratic choice rather than an ideological one.

It worked, in the narrow sense that it ended the deadlock. It did not work for long.

Gone Within a Year

The same court had already delivered one seismic ruling that month. On August 7, 2024, the Constitutional Court disbanded Move Forward entirely, finding that its campaign to reform Thailand's lèse-majesté law amounted to an attempt to undermine the constitutional monarchy, and banned Pita Limjaroenrat and the party's other executives from politics for ten years, according to Human Rights Watch and Time's coverage of the ruling. The party that had won the most votes in the 2023 election no longer legally existed.

A week later, on August 14, 2024, just shy of Srettha's one-year mark and less than a month before the ICS Bangkok team would have started planning its own next school year, the same court removed Srettha from office in a 5-4 ruling. The judges found he had violated the constitution by appointing Pichit Chuenban, a lawyer who had previously served jail time in a case tied to Thaksin Shinawatra's corruption trial, to a cabinet post despite the ethics cloud, as CNN and Al Jazeera reported at the time. It made Srettha the fourth Thai prime minister in sixteen years to be removed by the Constitutional Court rather than by an election or a resignation.

Parliament moved fast. Within days, Pheu Thai nominated 37-year-old Paetongtarn Shinawatra, daughter of Thaksin Shinawatra, who became the country's youngest prime minister. Her government did not last either. In August 2025, the Constitutional Court removed her too, ruling 6-3 that she "lacked the qualifications" for office after a leaked phone call surfaced in which she was heard criticizing a Thai army commander and deferring to Cambodia's former leader, Hun Sen, during a border dispute between the two countries, CNN and Al Jazeera reported. It made her the fifth Thai prime minister removed by the court since 2008. Thailand's current prime minister, Anutin Charnvirakul of the Bhumjaithai Party, took office in September 2025 and was re-elected by parliament in March 2026, according to a U.S. State Department statement and CNBC's coverage of that vote.

Four prime ministers, three of them removed by the same court, inside three years. The name the ICS Bangkok podcast read on air in 2023 turned out to be the start of that run, not the end of an uncertain chapter.

While the Politics Churned, the Tourists Kept Arriving

The other headline the students reported that week, tourism recovery, held up better than the political one, and the two stories sit in useful contrast. Thailand recorded 28.15 million foreign visitor arrivals in 2023, up from 11.06 million the year before, a jump of roughly 152%, according to tourism data compiled from Thai government sources. That inflow generated an estimated 1.4 trillion baht in tourism revenue and supported about 2.6 million jobs. Whatever instability was playing out in parliament, it did not visibly slow the recovery, a reminder that a country's economic engine and its political story don't always move in sync.

Headlines as a Habit

None of this required the podcast's hosts to editorialize. The value of episode 33's news segment isn't analysis. It's timing. A high school podcast produced by teenagers, running a routine three-item roundup at the start of a school year, happened to put a name and a vote count on record at the exact hinge point of a story that would keep making international news for the next three years.

That's arguably the more interesting story about Students Incorporated than the prime minister himself: a group of students, several of them brand-new to the show that week, built "check the news and report it straight" into the format from the start. Reading a wire-service-style headline about a parliamentary vote is a small thing. Doing it consistently, season after season, is closer to what a real newsroom asks of its youngest reporters, and it's why an episode about roll call and a party game turned out to have a story worth following for years after it aired.

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