The king of Thailand, Maha Vajiralongkorn, recently broke quarantine rules to fly 12,000 miles to attend a lavish banquet in his honor, Metro reported.
The king has been spending the COVID-19 lockdown in a luxurious German hotel with his 20 girlfriends, but over a 24-hour period, he returned to Bangkok, attended the banquet, and then flew back to Germany.
RELATED STORIES
The king, who also goes by King Rama X, has a reputation as a playboy.
His current wife, Queen Suthida, is his fourth, and she used to be a bodyguard. King Rama X kept his third wife, a waitress, a secret, only acknowledging her after she gave birth to their son in 2005.
King Rama X also brought 20 royal concubines along with him for his COVID-19 quarantine in Bavaria.
The hotel they’re all staying at would otherwise be locked down as well, but received special permission to stay open to serve the king and his retinue after he booked the whole building. Local authorities granted the exception because “the guests are a single, homogenous group of people with no changes,” The Sun reported.
For the quarantine-breaking trip, the king took a Thai Airways jet, making a stop in Switzerland to pick up his wife on the way, and again to drop her off on the way back to Germany.
While the king and his girlfriends have been staying in Germany, the queen has been self-isolating in Zurich.
The pair only re-united for the banquet, which celebrated Chakra Day, a national holiday honoring the establishment of the royal dynasty in 1782.
Both the nation’s prime minister and the head of the armed forces greeted the king at the airport before all went to the banquet.
At the banquet, the king commented on the ongoing pandemic, saying “This pandemic is not the fault of anybody. The government must solve the problem by understanding its causes. It is necessary to establish a system and communicate it to the people and to understand it well.”
Needless to say, many are not happy with the monarch at the moment.
However, while many might take issue with the king flouting the lockdown rules and spending the pandemic in luxury in Germany rather than his home nation, the king faces little criticism at home.
That’s largely because Thai law doesn’t allow criticism of the monarch; it’s punishable by up to 35 years in prison.
Nevertheless, a hashtag that translates to “Why do we need a king” trended on Twitter shortly after the news broke that the king would be spending the lockdown abroad, The Sun reported.
He has also been noted for some other behavior that might otherwise have drawn criticism.
For example, he made his poodle, Foo-Foo, an air marshal in the Thai Air Force. When the pet died in 2015, it was given a four-day Buddhist funeral.
And shortly after taking the throne in 2019, he took a royal consort, only to strip her of the title months later for “disrespecting” the queen.
Thailand has been in a national state of emergency over COVID-19 since March 26.
A curfew has also been in effect since April 3. The nation has so far reported 2,643 COVID-19 cases and 43 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins data .
