Cambodia’s PM guaranteed victory after ban on opposition party


Cambodia's long-serving PM Hun Sen knows how to win elections: ban the opposition. Photo: Getty
As Cambodians go to the polls, Prime Minister Hun Sen is a certain winner after suppressing rival candidates and the chief opposition party.
The European Union, United States and other Western countries refused to send observers, saying the election lacked the conditions to be considered free and fair.
That left only international officials from Russia, China and Guinea-Bissau on hand to watch as Hun Sun voted at a polling station in his home district outside of the capital, Phnom Penh.
The longest-serving leader in Asia, Hun Sen has steadily consolidated power with his strong-arm 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 degree from the US 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.
Family ties
Despite his Western education, 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 Noren-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 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.
Opposition scratched from ballot
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 organisation of almost 20 regional NGOs, said the National Election Commission had showed a “clear bias” toward the CPP in barring the Candlelight Party.
-with AAP