There is zero chance, Aides insist, of accessing the second floor. The upper reaches of Bangkok’s Venetian Gothic Government House are strictly for official work. Journalists (and even respectable guests) are only permitted to loiter among the watercolors and marble ornaments that adorn the ground-floor reception rooms. Everything above the grand staircase is strictly off-limits.
It doesn’t take long for Thai Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin to overrule this staid protocol, beckoning me up to his inner sanctum on the second floor, banishing the chastened courtiers and settling down to chat for an hour without notes.
A former property mogul who took office in September, the 62-year-old Srettha is nothing if not outgoing. He has made over 10 foreign trips to court investors including China, Japan, the U.S., and the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. The small meeting room where he sits down with TIME is ringed by whiteboards chock-full of scrawled policy objectives: digital wallets, national aviation hubs, potash mining, Tesla. His efforts are already paying dividends: foreign direct investment (FDI) in the fourth quarter of last year was double year over year. In November alone, he unveiled investments in Thailand by Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft worth a combined $8.3 billion. It’s with a salesman’s avuncular charm that he says, “I want to tell the world that Thailand is open for business again.”
It’s about time. For the past two decades, the self-styled Land of Smiles has been racked by bitter political schisms salute as a sign of dissatisfaction with both the democratic vacuum and fiscal bungling.
