Change in Cambodia, but not really

News this week is that Cambodia is getting a new prime minister, but this is only tangentially related to the election – or rather, “election” – held there last Sunday. Incumbent Hun Sen, in office since 1985 and about to turn 71, has announced his resignation and will be succeeded by his son, Hun Manet.

The election was, to no-one’s surprise, an overwhelming victory for Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party. At the last election, in 2018, it had won all of the 125 seats, after the main opposition party had been outlawed. This year that came down to 120, with five seats going to the royalist party, FUNCINPEC, an ally of the government. Turnout was claimed to be 84.2%, despite opposition calls for a boycott.

Having re-established, for all practical purposes, a one-party state, Hun Sen evidently feels it’s time to begin the transition, although he will no doubt keep effective control for some time: he remains party leader, president of the Senate and chairman of the privy council. At some point in the future his son may be able to bring in some liberalisation, but there is certainly no guarantee of that (compare, for example, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who turned out to be just as brutal as his father).

For all their other faults, Communist regimes have not usually been known for hereditary succession. But North Korea, where the Kim dynasty is now in its third generation, is an exception, and Cambodia now joins it.

The fall of Cambodian democracy (such as it was) is a reproach to the international community, which has mostly averted its gaze. The institutions put in place by the United Nations protectorate in the 1990s were never very effective, but for a time they succeeded in making Cambodia a much freer country than neighboring Laos and Vietnam. Although Hun Sen could not be dislodged, there was a functioning opposition, reasonably free elections and respect for civil liberties.

Over the last decade, however, it has all been dismantled. I can do no better than to repeat my conclusion from five years ago:

Now, however, that it has all come to grief, where is the UN? Where is the Security Council reso­lution to tell the world that Cambodia has breached the conditions under which its government was established?

I don’t for a moment suggest that the international community should invade Cambodia to unseat its autocratic leader. That would be a bad idea for a number of obvious reasons. But there needs to be concerted action to send the message that Hun Sen’s behavior is unacceptable and that his govern­ment has forfeited its title to legitimacy.

Of course, it won’t happen. Nations can agree, more or less, on the need to promote peace, or econ­omic development, or literacy, or infant welfare, or even sometimes (very selectively) human rights.

But electoral democracy, which does so much to underpin all these other goals, has few friends.