Cambodia’s strongman faces an unlosable election. But will he still run the country?

Phnom Penh: "Bravo Hun Manet, long live Hun Sen!” chanted devotees of Cambodia’s ruling party as they gathered in their thousands in the capital on Friday.

Clad in sky blue party garb, supporters lined the footpaths of Phnom Penh, feting the future prime minister of the South-East Asian nation as he was driven – smiling and waving – through the city in the back of a black utility vehicle, trailed by a flag-wielding procession of supporters on motorcycles.

Hun Manet (right), the eldest son of Cambodian leader Hun Sen, greets supporters in Phnom Penh.Credit: AP

It may as well have been a victory parade, with the outcome of Sunday’s election here essentially a sure thing. After a relentless crushing of opposition voices, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) is headed for a walkover in a vote where they face no genuine rivals.

The only real uncertainty now lies over exactly when Hun Sen – the world’s longest-serving prime minister – will hand the reins to his anointed successor, his eldest son Hun Manet, completing a transition of leadership years in the making.

All indications are that it will be sooner rather than later. Hun Manet, the 45-year-old West Point-trained army chief, is one of two prime ministerial candidates along with the strongman himself. And it was Hun Manet, not his father, who fronted the CPP’s final pre-election rally on Friday.

“We will raise Cambodia to the prestige of the Angkorian era,” he told the crowd, referring to the ancient Angkor empire, which occupied most of mainland South-East Asia during its rule from about 802 to 1431.

Hun Sen has ruled with an iron fist after becoming prime minister at the age of 32 in 1985.Credit: Reuters

Hun Manet said the CPP had brought development, peace and political stability during its decades in charge. “Only the CPP is able and capable of leading Cambodia. No other party can compare to us. We will win in a landslide election in Phnom Penh and nationwide,” he said.

After Hun Sen’s 38-year stranglehold on power, seemingly nothing has been left to chance in making the region’s latest family political dynasty a reality.

Dozens of figures from Cambodia’s political opposition have been barred from running for office, sentenced to prison for treason and conspiracy, or have fled overseas. Among the emigres are the opposition’s two most prominent leaders: Sam Rainsy, who is in self-exile in France, and Kem Sokha, who is still in the country but was in March ordered to spend 27 years under house arrest.

In the lead-up to the election, opposition officials who remained have faced legal and physical threats, while Western governments raised concerns about the latest of a series of forced closures of independent media outlets.

In May, the only significant challenger to the CPP was blocked from competing. The Candlelight Party – a burgeoning opposition group which drew supporters from Rainsy and Sokha’s banned Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) – made a splash in last year’s nationwide local elections, capturing 20 per cent of the vote.

But Cambodia’s National Election Committee struck the party out of the National Assembly polls because officials failed to produce its original registration documents from 1998.

Candlelight spokesman Kimsuor Phirith said the paperwork had been lost when the CNRP was dissolved in 2017. Its office was then below the CNRP base and officials were prevented afterwards from entering the building.

“[The government] are fearful and worried about the impact of the upcoming results,” Phirith said, arguing the disqualification was politically motivated. “Looking at the result of last year’s [local] commune election, we saw that the Candlelight Party had just been reorganised in one year and we had the support of nearly two million people.”

Cambodian People’s Party backers take to the streets of the capital on Friday.Credit: AP

But that would not have been nearly enough to unseat the CPP if the voting percentages had been replicated on Sunday.

The CPP is now strongly positioned to again capture all 125 lower-house seats – as it did in the last election in 2018 following the dissolution of the CNRP.

“In my own view as a local authority and a citizen, this is an election that will be held without a real competitor,” said 31-year-old Pal Kep, a deputy commune chief in the south-western Koh Kong province, who ran successfully with Candlelight in last year’s local election.

“As a local authority in my commune, I heard a lot of people saying that this election is not a good one. They likened it to a competition in kickboxing between a 10-day-old baby and a heavyweight.”

Although there are 17 other parties contesting the polls on Sunday, the odds are stacked overwhelmingly against them. The minor parties scored a collective 7 per cent of the vote in the 2022 local election – dwarfed by the might and resources of an organisation that has become synonymous with the state.

Driving around Phnom Penh in the back of a tuk-tuk on Friday, there was not a visible supporter of an opposition party in sight.

Fearing reprisals, few are willing to speak out.

“People are scared,” said Vorn Pao, president of the Independent Democracy of Informal Economy Association, a nongovernmental group that advocates for workers. “Some of us were accused of plotting against the nation and some joined the ruling party.

“If the situation continues like this, I think Cambodia would have no democracy. Democracy is dependent on people making decisions with free will and no fear. As long as the opposition, independent media and civil society are silenced, I don’t expect a shining of democracy.”

Union leader Vorn Pao was beaten by soldiers and jailed in 2014 over a workers’ protest.Credit: Chris Barrett

In the lead up to the election, there have been more arrests of opposition members who are alleged to have incited people to spoil their ballots by encouraging them not to vote. They were accused of contravening amendments to an election law rushed through last month that also prohibit Cambodians from becoming electoral candidates in the future if they don’t vote.

Hun Sen thundered that “extremists” were trying to ruin the election, raging at calls for voters to tear up their ballots or not turn up at all.

The one-sided nature of Sunday’s polls has led rights groups to variously deride them as a sham and mockery of democratic standards.

In an interview at CPP headquarters in downtown Phnom Penh, CPP spokesman Sok Eysan disputed those labels, referencing the multiparty line-up, branding Candlelight as an “anarchic not democratic” party and denying government critics had been prosecuted for political gain.

“The Candlelight Party was not allowed to contest the election by the National Election Committee. It was due to their own mistake. It was for no other reason,” he said.

“According to the spirit of the Paris Peace Agreements, Cambodia is required to follow the path of democracy and the rule of law. If the individual commits a crime they must be [held] responsible. There are no political cases. There are only cases about politicians who commit crimes.”

Asked by this masthead on Friday whether the election was free and fair, a mild-mannered Hun Manet replied that there were “no interviews today”.

Hun Sen supporters in Phnom Penh.Credit: Reuters

While he took centre stage, his notoriously tough-talking father has been doing most of the communication online. Hun Sen last month threatened to shut off access to Facebook, which is enormously popular in Cambodia, after the oversight board of parent company Meta said he had used his account to intimidate political opponents and recommended it be suspended for six months.

He didn’t follow through with it but instead quit the social media giant – on which he has 14 million followers – for three weeks, switching to messaging app Telegram to pump out party material. The prime minister’s Facebook account was reportedly reactivated on Thursday.

The platform is a hotline for Hun Sen to a vast base built and maintained with deep strings of patronage and including a civil service that is inextricably linked with the CPP.

The image crafted of Hun Sen as a saviour of the nation from the genocidal Khmer Rouge – he defected from its army and returned with Vietnamese forces that toppled Pol Pot – has also endeared him to those who lived through those horrors, as has economic development.

A vendor sells dried freshwater clam near political party posters for the barred Candlelight Party, left, and the CPP.Credit: AP

“I remembered the past misery. There was no food, only a few spoonfuls of watery porridge during the Khmer Rouge regime,” said 77-year-old Chhon Chheng as he drank tea with a friend at a local restaurant in the capital.”I prayed that if anyone could save my life, and give me food, I would be thankful to him, and I will serve him for the rest of my life. I will never forget it.”

Gordon Conochie, an adjunct research fellow at La Trobe University, said the CPP’s level of authority was rooted in its ability to control people at the village level.

“That starts with basically knowing everything about what happens in the village,” he said. “On election day they will have a list of people on the electoral roll and they will tick off who is coming to vote and who is not coming to vote, and if you’re not coming to vote they will know that.”

As for whether the apple will fall far from the tree in Cambodia, analysts do not anticipate a flowering of liberalism under a new prime minister.

Hun Sen has made clear, in fact, that he expects the fresh-faced Hun Manet to govern in the same way he has and – crucially – has said he will remain as CPP president.

”The reality is as long as Hun Sen is physically and mentally well and around, he is going to be seen as the ultimate decision maker, even if his son is the prime minister,” said Conochie, whose new book, A Tiger Rules the Mountain, charts Cambodia’s democratic trajectory. “Nobody is going to challenge his son as long as he is around.”

All eyes will turn to the timing of Hun Manet’s elevation after Sunday’s polls. But it is far from the changing of the guard many had once hoped for.

A supporter of the Cambodian People’s Party participates in a procession in Phnom Penh.Credit: AP

“The more of these Hun Sen-style elections take place in Cambodia, the more Cambodian democracy is on life support,” said Sophal Ear, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management.

“All that remains is for the plug to be pulled. The memory of what democracy felt and looked like is quickly fading, like a candle’s flame about to be snuffed out.”

- with Nara Lon

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