Hun Sen's Seemingly Seamless Succession In Cambodia

While some governments remained suspiciously silent,
including Australia's , and others sent congratulations,
such as Beijing , most reiterated their displeasure with the electoral process. From this perspective, Mis in power because there was no other choice. An illegitimate election begets an illegitimate prime minister.

Scholars of Cambodia and authoritarianism have provided more insightful answers.
Neil Loughin explained
the“hereditary succession” as deriving from a two-fold strategy that was implemented almost perfectly.

The first part of the strategy was to
systematically dismantle
opposition parties and affiliated institutions external to the CPP. Quashing all opposition left few outlets for dissent against Manet's succession.

The second strategy was to carefully manage any potential opposition to Mwithin the CPP. By allowing powerful party members such as Minister of National Defense Tea Banh and Minister of Interior Sar Kheng to pass their own positions to their children, the Hun family has maintained stability by dividing the country's spoils among the next generation of CPP elites.

Another answer, often unacknowledged in the media, as to why the succession was met with little pushback lies in the CPP's strategies towards education and youth engagement . A lesson learned after the 2013 election, when opposition parties made unexpected gains on the back of younger voters, was to make the ruling party more appealing to the youth.

Hun Sen
embraced Facebook
to speak to the younger generation of voters, who spend more time looking at their phones than watching television. This was why Meta's ban was important in 2023.

But the youth strategy extended beyond Facebook. A CPP Youth Working Group, which Mhas headed since June 2020, began promoting Cambodian culture and CPP interests both inside and outside Cambodia.

Countless university scholarships were awarded by groups connected to Hun Sen, and many public schools were renamed to honor prominent families of the CPP elite.

Hun Sen's youngest son, Hun Many, even became the president of the Union of Youth Federations of Cambodia, a supposedly nongovernmental organization that promotes education and healthcare across the country.

Over the past decade, the Cambodian youth have become a target for much of the country's political largess, effectively linking educational opportunity to the CPP in the minds of young voters.

But for every educational carrot there was a stick. There is evidence that the Cambodian curriculum began to be line-edited by the top echelons of the CPP as early as 2009, removing content deemed dangerto its interests. More recently, topics such as the color revolution were introduced into textbooks, aligning Hun Sen's rhetoric with educational curricula .

The development of critical thinking among Cambodia's youth was systemically stunted by these efforts just as the opposition was systemically dismantled. Many youths were educated to accept the staquo and to never challenge existing power dynamics. The CPP did everything it could to ensure there would be no repeats of the 2013 election, and it has succeeded.

Controlling education and youth, quelling internal resistance and dismantling any opposition paved the way to
Manet's coronation . Since the effects of these strategies are likely to persist long after the election, it is possible – although certainly not inevitable – that Hun Manet's reign will go
unchallenged for years, if not decades , to come.

Will Brehm is Associate Professor in Education at the University of Canberra.
He is the author of
Cambodia for Sale
and co-editor of
Public Policy Innovation for Human Capital Development ,
Memory in the Mekong
and
Education and Power in Contemporary Southeast Asia .

This article was originally published by East Asia Forum and is republished under a Creative Commons license.