After nearly four decades as Cambodian prime minister, Hun Sen goes into elections at the weekend certain of victory and vowing to eventually hand power to his eldest son, but the 70-year-old has given no timeframe for his dynastic succession and signaled he would continue to wield influence even after standing down.
Sunday’s vote is widely deemed a sham thanks to the near-total absence of genuine opposition parties, and critics say that more than 30 years after UN-brokered peace accords ended decades of bloody conflict, Cambodian democracy is in a sorry state.
“Nobody can block the steps forward of Hun Sen or Hun Manet,” the prime minister told voters last month. “After Hun Sen, it will be Hun Manet.”
Photo: AFP
While no fixed date has been given for a transfer of power, Hun Manet, 45, has taken on a number of his father’s campaign duties this year.
In a highly symbolic gesture at a rally for the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) this month, Hun Sen passed the party flag to Hun Manet, who led a crowd of supporters on a march through Phnom Penh.
Hun Manet has also traveled around the nation to preside over ceremonies and meet troops, workers and CPP members, repeating his father’s campaign mantras of peace and development.
“As long as the CPP continues to lead the country, can keep the peace and can keep balance, we all live with happiness,” he said in a clip posted on Telegram this month.
Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch said that the prospect of a dynastic handover “makes Cambodia look more like North Korea than a genuine democracy.”
Hun Sen has five children and has carved out political roles for all three of his sons, with the most senior responsibilities entrusted to his eldest, Hun Manet, already a member of the CPP’s powerful permanent committee, is to contest a parliamentary seat at the weekend for the first time.
He has served as commander of the Royal Cambodian Army since 2018 and met with foreign dignitaries and world leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — the leader of Cambodia’s main ally and benefactor.
Hun Sen’s politics are shaped by his experiences of revolution and war as a young man during the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime.
Those privations molded him into one of the most effective — and most ruthless — politicians of his generation and made him prime minister in 1985, aged just 32.
He has since consolidated his power by co-opting, jailing, sidelining or effectively exiling any opponents. By contrast, his son was raised in luxury and educated abroad, including at the US military academy West Point, but a Western education is no guarantee of a more liberal approach, said exiled politician Sam Rainsy, a longstanding foe of the Cambodian prime minister, pointing to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is more educated than Hafez al-Assad, but the son is politically worse than the father,” Rainsy said.
Sebastian Strangio, the author of a book about Hun Sen’s rule, said that so far Hun Manet had shown “little evidence that he will introduce anything more than cosmetic reforms to the current political system.”
Without his father’s backing it is not clear Hun Manet would be able to make changes even if he wanted to and he remains untested in the political arena, said political analyst Ou Virak, comparing him to an unproven, if well trained, martial arts fighter.
“The problem is he’s been spoon-fed, mostly with a golden spoon,” Ou said.
“You put them in the ring, they are going to get knocked out first round. You have to allow them to fight, to spar, to survive,” he said.
Rainsy, who on Monday was banned from running for office for 25 years for urging people to spoil their ballots, said that without “a new leader drawn from outside the Hun family” there would be no change to Cambodia’s autocratic political system.
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr has fired his national police chief, who gained attention for leading the separate arrests of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte on orders of the International Criminal Court and televangelist Apollo Carreon Quiboloy, who is on the FBI’s most-wanted list for alleged child sex trafficking. Philippine Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin did not cite a reason for the removal of General Nicolas Torre as head of the 232,000-member national police force, a position he was appointed to by Marcos in May and which he would have held until 2027. He was replaced by another senior police general, Jose
STILL AFLOAT: Satellite images show that a Chinese ship damaged in a collision earlier this month was under repair on Hainan, but Beijing has not commented on the incident Australia, Canada and the Philippines on Wednesday deployed three warships and aircraft for drills against simulated aerial threats off a disputed South China Sea shoal where Chinese forces have used risky maneuvers to try to drive away Manila’s aircraft and ships. The Philippine military said the naval drills east of Scarborough Shoal (Huangyan Island, 黃岩島) were concluded safely, and it did not mention any encounter with China’s coast guard, navy or suspected militia ships, which have been closely guarding the uninhabited fishing atoll off northwestern Philippines for years. Chinese officials did not immediately issue any comment on the naval drills, but they
POWER CONFLICT: The US president threatened to deploy National Guards in Baltimore. US media reports said he is also planning to station troops in Chicago US President Donald Trump on Sunday threatened to deploy National Guard troops to yet another Democratic stronghold, the Maryland city of Baltimore, as he seeks to expand his crackdown on crime and immigration. The Republican’s latest online rant about an “out of control, crime-ridden” city comes as Democratic state leaders — including Maryland Governor Wes Moore — line up to berate Trump on a high-profile political stage. Trump this month deployed the National Guard to the streets of Washington, in a widely criticized show of force the president said amounts to a federal takeover of US capital policing. The Guard began carrying
Ukrainian drone attacks overnight on several Russian power and energy facilities forced capacity reduction at the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant and set a fuel export terminal in Ust-Luga on fire, Russian officials said yesterday. A drone attack on the Kursk nuclear plant, not far from the border with Ukraine, damaged an auxiliary transformer and led to 50 percent reduction in the operating capacity at unit three of the plant, the plant’s press service said. There were no injuries and a fire sparked by the attack was promptly extinguished, the plant said. Radiation levels at the site and in the surrounding
RSS