THAILAND’S former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra said today that “democracy is dead” in the south-east Asian country.

Ms Shinawatra spoke out after the military-installed parliament voted to impeach her and ban her from politics for five years.

Prosecutors said they would indict the former PM on criminal charges connected to a rice subsidy programme that the new authorities say was corrupt and wasteful.

Ms Shinawatra has defended the programme as beneficial to the country’s poorer farmers. Her Pheu Thai party was backed by the left-leaning red shirts movement but opposed by the royalist yellow shirts, who orchestrated mass protests which gave the army an excuse to take over and “restore order.”

The ban on her involvement in politics will smooth the army’s path in rewriting electoral rules so that the red shirts are effectively kept out of power in future.