Longtime Cambodian leader Hun Sen has said he will step down as prime minister in three weeks’ time and hand the position to his oldest son, who won his first seat in parliament in weekend elections.
The announcement came after their Cambodian People’s Party won a landslide victory in the polls, which Western countries and rights organisations criticised as neither free nor fair, and in which the country’s main opposition was suppressed.
Hun Sen has been Cambodia’s autocratic leader for 38 years but said ahead of the elections that he would hand the position to his oldest son, Hun Manet, sometime during the next five-year term.
Hun Manet, 45, is currently the head of the country’s army.
In a televised address on Wednesday, Hun Sen, who is Asia’s longest-serving leader, said he had informed King Norodom Sihamoni of his decision and that the king had agreed.
Hun Sen said his son will be named prime minister after the National Election Commission reports the final results of Sunday’s election, in which the CPP won 120 of 125 seats.
He has also said a new generation will take over many of the top ministerial positions in the new government, which he said will be formed on August 22.
Even though he is stepping down from the premiership, Hun Sen is widely expected to remain closely involved in running Cambodia, and is also to become president of the country’s senate.
After a challenge from the opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party in 2013 that the CPP barely overcame at the polls, Hun Sen responded by going after leaders of the opposition, and eventually the country’s sympathetic courts dissolved the party.
Ahead of Sunday’s election, the unofficial successor to the CNRP, known as the Candlelight Party, was barred on a technicality from running in the election by the National Election Committee.
Following the election, the European Union criticised the vote as having been “conducted in a restricted political and civic space where the opposition, civil society and the media were unable to function effectively without hindrance”.
The United States went a step further, saying it had taken steps to impose visa restrictions “on individuals who undermined democracy and implemented a pause of foreign assistance programmes” after determining the elections were “neither free nor fair”.
Hun Sen had been a middle-ranking commander in the radical communist Khmer Rouge responsible for genocide in the 1970s before defecting to Vietnam. When Vietnam ousted the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979, he quickly became a senior member of the new Cambodian government installed by Hanoi.
A wily and sometimes ruthless politician, he has maintained power as an autocrat in a nominally democratic framework.
Hun Manet is a graduate of the US Military Academy West Point with a master’s degree from New York University and a doctorate from Bristol University in the UK.
Despite his Western education, however, observers do not expect any immediate shifts in policy after his father steadily moved Cambodia closer to China in recent years.
