Phnom Penh, Cambodia – Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has worked hard and hard to eliminate the possibility of losing power.
Having spent years undermining and stifling the country’s popular but often weak political opposition, Hun Sen approaches next weekend’s national election knowing it is a vote he is highly unlikely to lose.
The last remnant of Cambodia’s opposition movement was officially barred in May, on a technicality, from running in elections, and Hun Sen has left few stones unturned in his efforts to root out what remains of dissent and silence the dwindling number of his critics. still in the country
Three decades into Cambodia’s faltering democratic experiment, voters now say they associate the electoral process more with fear than hope for a chance to freely choose their country’s leadership.
In a dramatic reversal of the basic principle of choice in elections, voters told Al Jazeera how they now feared the possible consequences of not voting for Hun Sen.
“I’m afraid they will check the names,” said Phally*, a mother of five, who was concerned that Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) had access to voting data.
“And if they know I don’t vote,” he said, that’s where the trouble starts.
Sophal Ear, an associate professor at Arizona State University and an analyst of Cambodian politics, said Cambodia’s elections have become a tool of oppression.
The public now votes with “a metaphorical gun” to their heads, he said.
“Ultimately, is it even an election when there is no choice? China also has elections; just like the Soviet Union. No one pretended they were real,” he added.
While 17 other small political parties registered to stand in the election alongside Hun Sen’s ruling CPP on July 23, the disqualification of the Candlelight Party, the only credible opposition party, has ensured that the elections are a one-horse race.
The Candlelight Party was already a scaled-down but still popular replacement for Cambodia’s main opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party, which was disbanded by the country’s judiciary in 2017, four years after being very close to beating Hun Sen at the polls.
Cambodian leader for life
In his 38th year in power, Hun Sen has outlasted other long-time strongmen such as the late Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and the late Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, putting him near the top of the list of political leaders of the world they still live for a long time.
It’s a crown Hun Sen would be proud to claim.
“I have been in power in the government without interruption since January 8, 1979 until now,” Hun Sen boasted in a speech in April.
“More than 38 years as Prime Minister,” he said.
“There has been no such case in the world. I won three records. The first record is the youngest foreign minister in the world. The second record is the youngest prime minister in the world. The third record is the prime minister longest in the world”.
Although Hun Sen has effectively incapacitated all organized opposition in Cambodia, he remains fixated on “color revolutions” and so-called Western-backed extremists who he says are working to overthrow him.
Hun Sen, 70, was first installed as prime minister in 1985 by Vietnam’s political and military bosses who had intervened in the country six years earlier to oust Pol Pot’s radical communist Khmer Rouge regime. Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge deputy battalion commander, had defected to Vietnam as the regime’s purges killed, starved, and killed an estimated two million people in Cambodia.
With his survival instincts honed, Hun Sen even managed to hold on to power after a multi-year United Nations mission took over Cambodia’s administration in 1992 as part of a peace plan to end in the country’s civil war and in preparation for democratic elections, which Hun Sen’s party lost in 1993.
Since that first electoral defeat, Hun Sen has not allowed it to happen again.
He has cultivated personal loyalty among the country’s armed forces while watching the wealth and power of his family, friends and patrons grow. He has also enacted strategic laws that have silenced his critics and stymied all serious political competitors. Steady economic growth has also helped position him as Cambodia’s leader for life.
Kim Sok, a political analyst who went into exile in 2018 amid two defamation charges brought by the government, said a traditional Hun Sen tactic is to publicly call his critics by name, which works both to threaten dissidents and to warn the others. away from speaking for fear of being named.
Hun Sen’s tactic is to “fear” his critics, Kim Sok said.
“Many people do not support him and still demand justice and democracy,” he said, explaining that Hun Sen builds support through the cultivation of fear.
It works like this: people who support Hun Sen vote for him, and people who don’t support Hun Sen also vote for him, but out of fear.
“This is the reason Hun Sen keeps threatening,” Kim Sok said.
In a speech streamed live on his Facebook page in January, Hun Sen warned his critics that they had a choice between facing the courts or being beaten for saying his party had stolen votes in local elections.
An independent oversight board of Facebook’s parent company Meta ruled that Hun Sen had incited violence on the social media platform and recommended that the offending speech be retracted and that the prime minister be suspended from Facebook and Instagram for six months.
Kem Sokha, left, and Sam Rainsy, center right, leaders of the now-banned Cambodian People’s Opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party. [CNRP]greet his supporters in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2013. Kem Sokha has been sentenced to 27 years under house arrest, and Sam Rainsy has lived in exile for several years amid various criminal charges brought against him by the courts of cambodia [AFP]
Hun Sen’s reaction to the junta’s conviction was to delete his Facebook account, where he had amassed some 14 million followers, and announce that he would be moving to Telegram and TikTok.
While Hun Sen did not mention the board’s decision to incite online violence, Cambodia’s foreign ministry blacklisted all 22 members of Meta’s supervisory board.
Describing the board’s decision as “political in nature” and interfering in Cambodia’s internal affairs, the ministry declared the 22 members “personae non grata” and banned them from entering the country.
To vote or not to vote
With no credible opposition party to vote for, the government’s amendments to electoral laws earlier this year appeared to have been particularly prescient in terms of how to keep vote numbers high.
People who do not vote in two subsequent elections cannot run for office, and citizens can be fined for “incitement” if their advice or actions prevent others from voting.
It was also forbidden to destroy a ballot.
One voter told Al Jazeera she was confused by the new amendments to the voting law. He did not understand whether he faced a fine or other punishment for simply not voting.
“The government has not made people feel calm enough both mentally and physically,” he said, describing a general sentiment ahead of the vote.
These elections are also the first since Hun Sen said he was preparing to hand over power, but only to his son, Hun Manet, Cambodia’s army chief and a first-time candidate in the Assembly elections National of the lower house of the country. July 23
Another potential voter in Phnom Penh commented that Hun Sen seemed preoccupied with her son’s transition to power and was oblivious to the struggles of everyday people like her.
“Ahead of the election, people are suffering more and more,” he said, explaining that people feel their rights are being taken away and their future is financially unstable.
Instead of talking in his speeches about creating jobs and economic opportunities for people,” he said [Hun Sen] he tends to make threats to people,” he added.
Yet despite all of Hun Sen’s power and intimidation tactics, as well as the ruling party’s “tight political control” over rural villages, the disqualified Candlelight Party still won more than 20 percent of the popular vote in last year’s local elections, says Neil. Loughlin, professor at City, University of London, who has researched Cambodia’s political structures.
The key to Hun Sen’s power is building national security forces aligned personally and politically with him.
In doing so, Hun Sen has positioned himself at the center of the security forces and created an environment where the prime minister’s ambitious supporters can demonstrate their loyalty by using brutal tactics to suppress dissent, Loughlin wrote in a paper by research in 2021.
“In fact, whether in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, until now, coercion has been the main feature of Cambodia’s authoritarianism,” he told Al Jazeera.
*The name has been changed to protect the interviewee’s identity.
