The opposition Puea Thai Party, the latest in a series of political parties led or backed by ousted former PM Thaksin Shinawatra, claimed the government was at fault for the weeks of bloody violence in which nearly 1,800 were also wounded.They had also accused the government of violating the human rights of thousands of anti-government protesters whose nine-week demonstration from mid-March descended into urban warfare and the worst political violence in modern Thai history.
But today Mr Vejjajiva won his vote of no-confidence by 246 votes in favour and 186 against, confounding skeptics who has expected him to be politically crippled by the weeks of violence and lose the vote leading to the collapse of the government.
"Abhisit has emerged reasonably strong from the debate, at least among the powerful middle classes," according to Sombat Thamrongthanyawong, head of the National Institute of Development Administration (NIDA), as quoted by Reuters news agency.
"Since he is the incumbent who has support of the coalition, he won't feel the need to go to the polls soon," he added.
But it was not just Mr Vejjajiva who survived the votes - his deputy PM and four other cabinet members won by narrower margins, in some cases winning barely half of the 475 parliamentary votes, the result of a rift between two small parties in the coalition who withheld support from some of the ministers.
Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thaugsuban said the result "may be problematic" but insisted it had not affected government stability.
The mostly poor rural and urban protesters, broadly allied with Mr Shinawatra, had demanded an early election, saying Mr Vejjajiva had no popular mandate after coming to power in a parliamentary vote at the head of a coalition assembled with help from the military.
Mr Vejjajiva however has maintained that he was voted into office by the same parliament that picked his Thaksin-allied predecessors.
