Thai court disbands ruling party

By Nopporn Wong-Anan

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Thai Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat was banned from politics for five years and his party disbanded on Tuesday, spurring jubilant anti-government protesters to end their blockades of Bangkok's airports.

Government party members said they would switch to a new "shell" party, already set up, and vote for a new prime minister on December 8, setting the stage for another flashpoint in Thailand's three-year political crisis.

Chavarat Charnvirakul, a construction mogul and first deputy prime minister, was named interim leader, an official said.

Anti-government protesters cheered Somchai's fall after only 2- months in power, brought down by a Constitutional Court ruling that disbanded the ruling party for vote fraud.

Protest leaders said they would halt all rallies, including crippling sieges of Bangkok's two airports which have stranded a quarter of a million foreign tourists.

"We've won!" shouted one of the protesters, Angkana Wongticha, as members of the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD) went wild.

PAD leader Sondhi Limthongkul said they would pull out of Suvarnabhumi and Don Muang airports at 10 a.m. (0300 GMT) on Wednesday, but the protest halt was conditional.

"If a puppet government returns or a new government shows its insincerity in pushing for political reform, we will return," said Sondhi. He had accused Somchai of being a pawn of his brother-in-law, former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a coup in 2006.

The airports operator said it would decide on Wednesday when passenger flights in and out of the capital could resume.

The chaos may soon be over for thousands of stranded travelers in Thailand, but the country's wider conflict between forces loyal to Thaksin and Bangkok's royalist elites looked set to drag on.

"The divisions are so deep, it's difficult to see how it could be over," said political analyst Giles Ungpakhorn of Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University.

The Constitutional Court also disbanded two other parties in Somchai's six-party coalition for vote fraud in the 2007 general election and barred their leaders from politics for five years.

Somchai's predecessor, Samak Sundaravej, was also removed by the courts for hosting a TV cooking show while in office.

Tuesday's rulings raised the risk of clashes between yellow-shirted PAD supporters and pro-government red-shirts, who surrounded the court and forced judges to find a new venue.

"The judgment was fixed," Rojarek Phalaburee, a government supporter from the northern province of Chiang Mai, said.