🇰🇭 Cambodia votes on Sunday. Then what?
🇻🇳 Death penalty on the table as corruption case hits courts
Hello friends!
Holy smokes! I’ve glibly said before that there are often weeks in which I comply these newsletters and nothing really seems to be happening. Everyone, everywhere is chugging along with long-running situations and circumstances.
And then there are weeks like this one in which is seriously consider dropping the tone a few levels of formality and pepper the whole thing with interrobang and swear words. Because I simply do not understand how so much can suddenly be happening everywhere.
On that note, as I compiled this one today we have an enormous developing update from Thailand. Today was meant to be Move Forward’s Pita Limjaroenrat’s second tilt at winning over the joint sitting and becoming prime minister.
Well, forget all that, the Constitutional Court has ordered Pita be suspended as a member of parliament pending the case of his iTV shares. What happens now? I have no idea so shall be back for an update on Friday.
But beyond Thailand, we have the Cambodian election this weekend and Vietnam’s enormous corruption case has made it to the courts.
Let’s crack in!
Erin Cook
🇰🇭 Counting Down
Cambodia will vote in its national elections this Sunday. The story isn’t at all about who will win, these pages and many others have documented a year of Prime Minister Hun Sen and allies systematically destroying any credible opposition culminating in the Candlelight Party being barred from participation. The story instead is just what kind of country will emerge in the coming year.
Hun Sen has effectively stitched it up so son Hun Manet will, at some stage, take over the reins to lead the country. Dynastic transfers of power are always a tricky time and Hun Sen isn’t the only heavy-hitter in the party. I’m extremely curious to see how this plays out.
But more compelling, I think, is how the electorate will respond. This fantastic piece from Shaun Turton and Bopha Phorn in Nikkei Asia begins with some insights from tuk-tuk driver Yem Vantith. He spent 2013 campaigning for the now-banned Cambodia National Rescue Party. He was motivated by a strong desire to see change in the country and now, a decade on, there’s nowhere for those energies to go.
This is a longer piece that takes a comprehensive look at the decline of democracy — or at least the promise of it — and what that means for the Khmer people, the economy and the future. Truly, find a half hour between now and polls opening Sunday to have a read.
Elsewhere, Phon Sothyroth has crunched the numbers for CamboJA and the data is clear: the Cambodian People’s Party is a family affair. The party is running 125 candidates and of those at least 28 are related to someone else. That accounts for 22.4% of the ballot, up from 8.8% in the 2018 election. Five of this year’s 28 are of the Hun Sen clan. This piece includes a list of the family players. Fantastic work from CamboJA.
Another excellent read from Al Jazeera on how voters are feeling ahead of casting (or not casting) their say. “I’m afraid they will check names,” one woman told the outlet of the voting rolls. She worries that “if they know I don’t vote” there will be repercussions. US-based analyst Sophal Ear put it succinctly: “Ultimately, is this even an election when there is no choice? China has elections too; as did the Soviet Union. Nobody pretended they were for real.” It’s a line that would have once sounded a bit much but now rings true.
VOA reports ISPs have been ordered to block access to specific news outlets in the country, including Cambodia Daily Khmer and Radio Free Asia. Access to the Twitter account of Komnotra, Voice of Democracy’s phoenix-from-the-ashes database, has also been shuttered though it appears to remain accessible on Facebook. Nop Vy, executive director of the Cambodian Journalists Alliance Association, told VOA that the move, ordered by the Ministry of Telecommunications, is in violation of the constitution: “It also impacts the rights to information and publishing information as stipulated in the article 41 of the constitution. It is a worry and I think there is no benefit to the government and the general public,” he said.
‘It goes without saying that this longevity can’t be credited to Hun Sen’s knack for retail politics,’ the East Asia Forum editorial board writes this week reflecting on Hun Sen’s long reign.
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