Thailand stirred by noodle stunt

Call it "noodlegate". As cameras clicked, Prime Minister-elect Yingluck Shinawatra, sleeves rolled up, stirred a dish of spicy noodles at a market, surrounded by hungry voters ahead of a crucial election.

The event, designed to burnish the 44-year-old businesswoman's folksy appeal, landed her in trouble. After her party won Thailand's 3 July election by a landslide, rivals cried foul, accusing her of breaking laws against handing out gifts or, in her case, noodles.

Two weeks after leading her Puea Thai Party to victory, the political honeymoon is over for Thailand's first female prime minister-elect.

The political novice is under pressure to come good on big-spending campaign promises and appease supporters of her controversial brother, self-exiled former prime minister

Thaksin Shinawatra, without damaging the economy or giving her brother's enemies a pretext to challenge her.

She survived "noodlegate" - the case was thrown out after a ruling that she only cooked the noodles and didn't serve them. But she faces a bigger challenge over a probe into whether her party broke election laws.

Thailand's election watchdog has yet to certify Yingluck's victory and a battery of legal threats has raised the question of whether the election results will be reversed - a scenario that could draw thousands of her supporters on to the streets.

She is struggling to shed the widely held belief that she is a proxy for Thaksin, a billionaire at the centre of Thailand's intractable crisis - loved by millions of the poor but loathed by many middle-class Thais, generals and conservatives.

Puea Thai campaigned on Thaksin's name and his populist policies. While these helped to win over the rural masses, they could undo her.

The governing Democrat Party, which lost the election and is allied with the elite in Bangkok and the military, has demanded Puea Thai's dissolution for allegedly allowing banned politicians to direct its campaign, including Thaksin. They cite one of Puea Thai's campaign slogans, "Thaksin thinks, Puea Thai acts".

Andrew Walker, a Thailand specialist at the Australia National University, said Yingluck must tread carefully but attempts to topple her would put the country on a "dangerous path".

He said: "There is no way they can credibly claim this election result does not reflect the will of Thai voters."