Cambodia will formalize this Tuesday the transfer of power, after 38 years, from Hun Sen to his eldest son, Hun Manet. When you think of a hereditary dictatorship in Asia, your mind goes to Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. However, the Phnom Penh formula has proven much more perfect, after long ago burying the hammer and sickle and giving itself a democratic façade.
However, the new Cambodian Prime Minister, General Hun Manet, will remain in his father’s shadow. In addition to retaining the leadership of the Cambodian People’s Party (PPC), Hun Sen seizes the presidency of the Senate, which will make him head of state whenever the king is out of the country.
Likewise, Hun Sen, 71, would have confided to his clique that after becoming a prime minister’s father, he intends to become, in the next decade, a prime minister’s grandfather, despite the fact that the country holds multiparty elections on paper.
As the height of paradoxes, the Cambodian monarchy is not hereditary. Although neither could it be with the current king, Norodom Sihamoni, a former dancer in Paris, single and without children.
The generational change in Cambodia has been carefully programmed so that nothing changes. Thus, the elections last July, in which once again any party capable of overshadowing the PPC had been disqualified in advance, gave the latter 220 of the 225 deputies, with more than 82% of the votes.
In its “perfect” regime, the tentacles of the PPC reach all corners of Cambodia and the municipalities that it does not control, with an iron fist, can be counted on the fingers.
Hun Sen always lands on his feet, for five decades. According to him, the massive American bombing raids on Cambodia during the Vietnam War prompted him to join the Khmer Rouge, to whom he lost an eye.
Hun Sen entered Phnom Penh with this sinister-remembered Maoist guerrilla in 1975. And catlike, four years later he did it again with his former Vietnamese enemies. Although he was, for more than a decade, the man from Hanoi in Cambodia – while the West continued to support the Khmer Rouge as a “legitimate” government – ??his Cambodia has been, for years, the country in Southeast Asia closest to Beijing, with Laos permission.
Last weekend, the Chinese Foreign Minister was the first to go to Phnom Penh to congratulate Hun Sen and Hun Manet. The latter trained, by the way, at the American Academy of West Point.
A week earlier, on a “personal” visit, the guests at Hun Sen’s birthday had been two former prime ministers of neighboring Thailand, ousted by the military, Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck.
The rejuvenation of the Cambodian government, as seen, does not imply a change of surnames. The defense and interior ministers, for example, will be replaced by their respective sons. The vice prime minister will be another scion – the minor – of Hun Sen, until now chief of police. Another of his sons controls the secret services.
With Hun Sen, the PPC abandoned Marxism-Leninism for the most stark capitalism, without breaking a sweat. As in the case of China, the Cambodian government believes it can redeem itself before its fellow citizens for two decades of industrialization and growth of 7% per year.
It has also become the best partner for the new Chinese silk routes, which have modernized ports, highways and railways. The Sihanoukville port is already home to dozens of Chinese capital casinos, with direct flights to Macao.
