Hun Sen’s Cambodia election: like a World Cup, with just one team
As the prime minister’s rigged election seems sure to extend his 33-year reign, Cambodians despair the onset of one-party rule
Prime Minister Hun Sen authorised up to 50,000 election observers, but there’s nothing to see other than a political farce. Hun Sen and his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) have been ruling with an iron fist for 33 years, ever since the embers of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime petered out.
The opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) nearly caused an upset in the 2013 election and has regularly called out Hun Sen and the corruption within government, with Hun Sen alone accused of embezzling over US$1.3 billion (HK$10 billion) from public coffers. According to Transparency International, a global anticorruption coalition, Cambodia is the most corrupt nation in Southeast Asia, and one of the worst 20 offenders globally.
So this time around, Hun Sen is taking no chances. Starting last year with the arrest and imprisonment of CNRP leader Kem Sokha, after his predecessor Sam Rainsy was forced into exile, the CPP went on to close down the liberal newspaper Cambodia Daily and muffled two independent radio stations before blunting the opposition for good by dissolving the CNRP last October and banning its 118 MPs from politics for five years, most of whom fled to Thailand for their own safety.
