Introducing our Newest Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva

If new Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva wants to keep his job, he will have to draw on his childhood talent as a mediator to win over the poor rural voters who overwhelmingly spurned his party in last year's election.

Abhisit, 44, became Thailand's fourth leader since January when lawmakers elected him yesterday. A graduate of Eton College and the University of Oxford, and a friend of London Mayor Boris Johnson, he replaces Somchai Wongsawat.

The former opposition leader must restore investor confidence shattered by six months of anti-government protests that paralyzed the country, culminating in an eight-day seizure of Bangkok's airports during the peak tourism season. He faces deep divisions between the elite middle class that backs him and poor farmers who have helped elect parties linked to former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra four times in eight years.

"Abhisit's from a new generation of Thai leaders, but he's not without limitations," said Panitan Wattanayagorn, a political science lecturer at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University. "He needs to connect more with the grassroots."
In the 2007 general election, Abhisit's Democrat Party won only four of 135 seats in the northeast, the country's poorest region and home to a third of the electorate. During the protests, he sided with well-to-do royalist demonstrators led by the People's Alliance for Democracy, a force that helped oust Thaksin and his two successors.

Thailand Protest Threat
About 30 lawmakers from the dissolved People Power Party defected to Abhisit yesterday, arguing he would make the country more stable. Protesters had vowed to return to the streets if Puea Thai, the successor to People Power and holder of the most seats in Parliament, had formed another government.

Abhisit was a "taciturn" child, said his mother, Sodsai Vejjajiva. He was head of the class at the elite Satit Chula elementary school in Bangkok, where he acted as an intermediary when other children fought, she said.

"I feel more pity for him," Sodsai, a medical-school professor, said in an interview after his election yesterday. "We don't know what we are going into. I would imagine some suffering."