Cambodia holds a one-sided election on Sunday that is certain to prolong the ruling party’s dominance of politics, clearing the path for a historic leadership transition and the end of the reign of one of the world’s longest-serving premiers. The contest is effectively a one-horse race, with Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), a political behemoth with a vast war chest, facing no viable opponent after a ruthless, years-long crackdown on its rivals. Cambodia’s Hun Sen, one of the world’s longest-ruling leaders, has indicated his eldest son and anointed successor Hun Manet might take over as soon as next month in a surprise revelation just days out from a one-sided election. It had been widely expected that the U.S. and British-educated Hun Manet, 45, would take over from his father, who has ruled Cambodia for nearly four decades, but no timeframe had previously been given. “In three or four weeks, Hun Manet can become the prime minister. It depends on whether Hun Manet will be able to do it or not,” Hun Sen said in an interview with China’s Phoenix TV aired on Thursday. The self-styled strongman and former Khmer Rouge guerrilla Hun Sen turns 71 next month. Hun Manet, one of Cambodia’s top military generals and former chief of his father’s bodyguard unit, makes his debut as a candidate in the election on Sunday. The Associated Press has the story:
Cambodian leader’s son to take reins of power
Newslooks- PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP)
Hun Sen has been Cambodia’s autocratic prime minister for nearly four decades, during which the opposition has been stifled and the country has grown increasingly close to China.
With his Cambodian People’s Party virtually guaranteed another landslide victory in this Sunday’s election, it’s hard to imagine dramatic change on the horizon. But the 70-year-old former communist Khmer Rouge fighter and Asia’s longest-serving leader says he is ready to hand the premiership to his oldest son, Hun Manet, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point who heads the country’s army.
Tens of thousands of supporters packed a central square in the capital before daybreak on Friday to hear the 45-year-old’s 7 a.m. kick-off to the CPP’s final day of campaigning before the vote.
With a warm smile and soft tone, a stark contrast to his father’s stern look and military-like cadence, Hun Manet said the CPP had brought peace, stability and progress to the Cambodian people.
“Voting for the Cambodian People’s Party is voting for yourselves,” he told the cheering crowd, promising to return Cambodia’s national pride to a “greater level than the glorious Angkor era” of the Khmer Empire, centuries ago.
With the only credible challenge to the CPP barred from participating in the elections on a technicality, Cambodians are being offered little choice but to vote for the ruling party again. The arrests over the past week of several leading opposition figures have served to help stifle visible support for anyone but the CPP on the streets of Phnom Penh.
“Authorities in Cambodia have spent the past five years picking apart what’s left of the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association,” Amnesty International’s Montse Ferrer said Friday. “Many people feel that they are being forced to participate in this election despite their party of choice not being on the ballot.”
There was, however, a palpable sense of excitement as Hun Manet walked through the crowd of some 60,000 shaking hands and taking selfies, before taking a position next to his wife in the back of a pickup truck for a long parade through the city.
Sixteen-year-old Sin Dina, one of many young people who turned out, jumped up and down and waved the Cambodian flag as Hun Manet drove slowly by, said it was the first time she had the opportunity to see him in person.
“He looks like a gentleman, down to earth, approachable, and he’s well-educated” she said, adding she only regretted she was too young to vote. “He’s an appropriate successor to his father.”
Many in the crowd spoke of Hun Manet’s education — his bachelor’s at West Point being followed by a master’s at New York University and a doctorate in economics from Britain’s Bristol University.
His background has given rise to hope from some in the West that he might bring political change, but it will still take work to regain influence in the Southeast Asian country of 16.5 million, given China’s strategic and economic importance, said John Bradford, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.
“A Cambodia led by Hun Manet might very well be a stronger U.S. ally, but the U.S.-Cambodia relationship can only thrive if it is built on strong fundamentals of common benefit and mutual respect,” Bradford said. “U.S. diplomats should focus on these things.”
At the top of Washington’s concerns is China’s involvement in construction at Cambodia’s Ream Naval Base, which could give Beijing a strategically important military outpost on the Gulf of Thailand.
Ground was broken last year on the Ream project, and satellite imagery of the ongoing construction from Planet Labs PBC taken about a month ago and analyzed by The Associated Press shows a jetty now large enough to accommodate a naval destroyer, if the water is deep enough.
Regionally, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which Cambodia chaired last year, has criticized Phnom Penh for undermining its unity in disputes with China over South China Sea territorial claims.
It is not clear when — or even if — Hun Sen will hand off to his son during the next five-year government term, though most seem to think it will happen early enough for Hun Manet to establish himself in the job before the next election.
Both men refused requests to be interviewed by The Associated Press.
Even when Hun Manet does take over, Bradford said it might not mean any change at all, noting that educational and personal background do not necessarily translate into leadership style or political stance.
“We have a dictator in North Korea who went to school in Switzerland,” he said. “His choices don’t exactly reflect Swiss values.”
Hun Manet has given few clues himself, posting frequently on Facebook and Telegram like his father but revealing little of his political leanings.
And few think Hun Sen will fade into the woodwork, instead choosing now as a good time to turn over power so that he can still maintain a large degree of control from the sidelines, said Gordon Conochie, a research fellow at Australia’s La Trobe University and author of “A Tiger Rules the Mountain: Cambodia’s Pursuit of Democracy,” which was published this month.
“It means that while his son is establishing his own authority as prime minister, he’s still got a relatively young, healthy — physically and mentally — father behind him,” Conochie said.
“The reality is that as long as Hun Sen is there, nobody’s going to move against them. And Hun Sen will be the man in charge, even if his son is the prime minister.”
Hun Sen joined the Khmer Rouge at age 18 as it fought to seize power, losing his left eye in the final battle for Phnom Penh in 1975.
When a series of purges within the genocidal communist regime, blamed for the deaths of some 1.7 million Cambodians, put his own life at risk, he fled to neighboring Vietnam, returning to help oust his former comrades in 1979 alongside an invading Vietnamese army.
By his late 20s he was installed as foreign minister by occupying Vietnamese forces, and in 1985 became prime minister, the world’s youngest at the time.
Over the decades he tightened his grip on power while ushering in a free-market economy and helping bring an end to three decades of civil war.
Ly Chanthy, who braved a steady downpour to watch Hun Manet’s parade through the city on Friday, said she remembered the Khmer Rouge days and would be forever grateful to Hun Sen, and was happy to back his son.
“I will vote for the Cambodian People’s Party until I die,” said the 58-year-old, a Cambodian flag on a makeshift pole over her shoulder.
“I will never forget that he rescued our lives from the Pol Pot regime.”
Under Hun Sen, Cambodia has seen an average annual economic growth of 7.7% between 1998 and 2019, It was elevated from a low-income country to lower middle-income status in 2015, and expects to attain middle-income status by 2030, according to the World Bank.
But at the same time the gap between the rich and poor has greatly widened, deforestation has spread at an alarming rate, and there has been widespread land grabbing by Hun Sen’s Cambodian allies and foreign investors.
As discontent strengthened opposition, the country’s compliant courts dissolved the main opposition party ahead of 2018 elections, and over the past five years the government has strongarmed any dissent while effectively pushing a message of peace and prosperity.
An element of “diehard opposition” remains, but even though a “silent majority” may want more options, most are comfortable enough in their jobs and lives that they’re not motivated to demand change, said Ou Virak, president of Phnom Penh’s Future Forum think tank.
With Hun Manet due to take over as prime minister, and an expected wholesale replacement of top ministers, the election will bring a “generational change” to Cambodia’s leadership, which could begin a “honeymoon period” for international diplomacy, he said.
But people will be disappointed if they expect a sharp pivot away from China, he added.
“China is still Cambodia’s main backer, Cambodia’s main superpower partner,” he said. “So I think any shift to the West will be limited, because you can’t alienate your main supporter.”
Hun Sen is the longest serving leader in Asia. He’s purged critics and is set to win Cambodian polls
Newslooks- PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP)
Cambodians go to the polls Sunday with incumbent Prime Minister Hun Sen and his party all but assured a landslide victory thanks to the effective suppression and intimidation of any real opposition that critics say has made a farce of democracy in the Southeast Asian nation.
The longest-serving leader in Asia, Hun Sen has steadily consolidated power with his strongarm tactics over the last 38 years. But, at age 70, he has suggested he will hand off the premiership during the upcoming five-year term to his oldest son, Hun Manet, perhaps as early as the first month after the elections.
Hun Manet, 45, has a bachelor’s from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point as well as a master’s from NYU and a Ph.D. from Bristol University in Britain. He is currently chief of Cambodia’s army.
Despite his Western education, however, observers don’t expect any immediate shifts in policy from that of his father, who has steadily drawn Cambodia closer to China in recent years.
“I don’t think anyone expects Hun Sen to sort of disappear once Hun Manet is prime minister,” said Astrid Norén-Nilsson, a Cambodia expert at Sweden’s Lund University. “I think they will probably be working closely together and I don’t think that there is a big difference in their political outlook, including foreign policy.”
Hun Manet is just part of what is expected to be a broader generational change, with the ruling Cambodian People’s Party planning to install younger leaders into most ministerial positions.
“That’s going to be the big change of guard, that’s what I’m watching,” Norén-Nilsson said. “It’s all about the transition, it’s all about who’s going to come in and in what positions they find themselves.”
Hun Sen had been a middle-ranking commander in the radical communist Khmer Rouge responsible for genocide in the 1970s before defecting to Vietnam. When Vietnam ousted the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979, he quickly became a senior member of the new Cambodian government installed by Hanoi.
A wily and sometimes ruthless politician, Hun Sen has maintained power as an autocrat in a nominally democratic framework.
His party’s stranglehold on power faltered in 2013 elections, in which the opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party won 44% of the popular vote to CPP’s 48%. Hun Sen responded to the wake-up call by going after leaders of the opposition, primarily through sympathetic courts, which eventually dissolved the party after local elections in 2017 when it again fared well.
Ahead of Sunday’s election, the Candlelight Party, the unofficial successor to the CNRP and only other contender capable of mounting a credible challenge, was barred on a technicality from contesting the polls by the National Election Committee.
While virtually assuring another landslide victory for Hun Sen and his party, the methods have prompted widespread criticism from rights groups.
Human Rights Watch said the “election bears little resemblance to an actual democratic process,” while the Asian Network for Free Elections, an umbrella organization of almost 20 regional NGOs, said the National Election Commission had showed a “clear bias” toward the CPP in barring the Candlelight Party.
“Such disqualification further exacerbates the imbalanced and unjust political environment, leaving minimal room for opposition voices to compete on equal footing with the ruling party,” the group said in a joint statement.
“Moreover, the shrinking space available for civil society and the deliberate targeting of human rights defenders and activists raise serious alarm. The constriction of civic space undermines the active participation of civil society in the electoral process without fear of reprisal.”
After the “vastly unpopular” way the opposition was neutralized in 2018, this time around there is little sign of widespread popular discontent, Norén-Nilsson said, because Hun Sen and the CPP have done a very effective job over the past five years of building a sense among many Cambodians that they are part of a new national project.
The strategy has involved careful messaging, with sweeping slogans like “small country, big heart,” and little talk about policy, she said.
“It’s really quite astonishing how the CPP has managed to gain at least acceptance for what we see now,” she said. “If before people thought that the glass was half empty, now it’s half full, so you focus more on what you have than don’t have.”
With the Candlelight Party out of the running, the largest beneficiary of any anti-CPP vote will likely be FUNCINPEC, a royalist party whose name is an unwieldy French acronym for the National Front for an Independent, Neutral and Cooperative Cambodia.
Founded in 1981 by Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s former king, the party defeated the CPP in 1993 U.N.-run elections, but his son, Norodom Ranariddh, ended up having to agree to a co-prime ministership with Hun Sen.
Today’s party president, Norodom Chakravuth, who returned from France to take control of the party a little over a year ago after the death of his father Norodom Ranariddh, told The Associated Press that his sights are more on the 2028 election but is hoping this time to possibly win one or two seats.
