Watching Cambodia’s Commune Elections

On June 5, Cambodia will go to the polls for important commune and sangkat council elections, a curtain-raiser for national elections due to be held next year. More than 80,000 candidates belonging to 17 political parties have registered for the polls, and will compete for 11,622 council positions and the leadership of 1,652 communes and sangkats across the country.

Councils in the communes and sangkats, the administrative division above the village-level, have outsized importance in Cambodia. In addition to controlling the grassroots machinery of government – everything from marriage registrations to the distribution of aid during natural disasters – commune councilors periodically elect the members of district, provincial, and municipal councils, as well as most members of the Cambodian Senate.

This year’s election is in many ways a foregone conclusion. After a concerted crackdown on its opponents, the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) controls every seat in the National Assembly, and goes into the election with control over every commune and sangkat in the country bar one. It is the only party running candidates in every commune. Prime Minister Hun Sen, who is also the party’s president, has effectively ruled Cambodia since 1985.

Indeed, it is likely to be a far cry from the last commune/sangkat election in June 2017, when the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), a merger of two popular opposition parties, managed to win 43.8 percent of the popular vote, roughly the proportion that it won at national elections in 2013.

The CPP responded with a fierce crackdown on all sources of formal and indirect opposition. In September of that year, police arrested CNRP President Kem Sokha on charges of treason; they alleged that he had conspired with foreign governments to overthrow the CPP during post-election protests in 2013-14. Two months later, a CPP-controlled court used this as a pretext to dissolve the CNRP altogether, driving most of its senior leadership into exile abroad. This was paralleled by assaults on the civil society organizations and independent media outlets that were established during the United Nations peacekeeping operation of 1992-93.

With the CNRP out of the way, the CPP ran in the 2018 national election virtually unopposed, winning all 125 seats in the National Assembly. The party’s clean sweep marked not just the eradication of any meaningful source of political opposition, but also the repudiation of the 1991 Paris Peace Agreements, which had laid out the blueprint for Cambodia’s transition from civil war and one-party rule to peace and multiparty democracy.

Against this backdrop, there is little chance that the commune/sangkat polls will represent a meaningfully free contest. Barring “genuine efforts toward democratization and political reform” by the CPP government, the election is likely to fall far short of “fair, credible, transparent, inclusive, and peaceful,” the Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL) noted in a pre-election analysis of the country’s political landscape.

However, as the first election to be held since the CPP’s clean sweep at the 2018 national election, the conduct and outcome of the commune elections give some sense of how much political space the CPP intends to permit as Hun Sen moves toward his long-expected retirement.

Amid the shoal of minnow-like, pro-CPP parties, just one opposition party has any chance of cutting into the CPP’s near-total control of the commune elections. The Candlelight Party (CP) is the latest incarnation of the Sam Rainsy Party, led by the opposition figure of the same name, which merged with Kem Sokha’s Human Rights Party to form the CNRP in 2012. The CP is well positioned for a number of reasons. It is fielding the second-highest number of candidates in the election, and is well positioned to capture the large chunk of votes that once went to the CNRP. Indeed, in a free and fair election it would likely mount a serious challenge to the CPP.

But it faces a number of challenges in replicating the CNRP’s performance from five years ago. For one thing, there are the controversial circumstances surrounding the once-dormant party’s reactivation last November, a move that helped prompt the collapse of the alliance between Sam Rainsy and Kem Sokha. A lack of unity had been the perennial problem for the Cambodian opposition, and one of the reasons that the CNRP performed so well at elections in 2013 and 2017 is that it managed the rare feat of gathering the major opposition forces into one camp.

Given the acrimony that accompanied the Rainsy-Sokha split, however, there has to be some question mark over whether the CP can successfully appeal to CNRP supporters who were more aligned with Kem Sokha. In some ways, however, this is a moot point,  since it is clear that Hun Sen and the CPP have permitted the party’s reemergence on the proviso that it does not pose any direct challenge. Indeed, opposition officials have already made numerous allegations of intimidation and interference on the part of local CPP authorities.

The more interesting and unpredictable aspect to the election concerns how the commune election, and the 2023 national election, play into Cambodia’s international alignments. Cambodian elections are typically times of added international scrutiny, and have served as a catalyst for Western governments to reassess their approach to the country.

For instance, the banning of the CNRP in 2017 and the subsequently non-competitive 2018 national election figured prominently in the European Union’s 2020 decision to partial suspend the tariff-free access that Cambodia enjoys under the bloc’s Everything But Arms scheme. The political crackdown, in tandem with Hun Sen’s growing alignment with China, also prompted the United States to impose targeted sanctions on key allies of Hun Sen and to threaten a reassessment of the trade preferences that Cambodia enjoys under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP). The chill in relations with the West has prompted Hun Sen’s government to deepen its already close relationship with Beijing, which has, in turn, further soured relations with Washington and Brussels.

There is an indication that Western governments will be watching the upcoming elections closely. In early May, the European Parliament adopted a resolution expressing “its deep concern over the backsliding on human rights in Cambodia in light of the upcoming local elections in June 2022 and national elections in 2023.” The resolution suggested that the European Commission should be “prepared to use all tools available, including a complete suspension of Cambodia’s ‘Everything But Arms’ status and other sanctions, if electoral observers find evidence of unfair elections.” In Washington, meanwhile, Hun Sen’s authoritarianism and close relationship with China have become largely indistinguishable in the minds of many U.S. policymakers.

All this gives Hun Sen’s government a strong incentive to loosen the reins during the upcoming election season. Recent government rhetoric seems to hint in this direction. During a meeting with U. S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the sidelines of last month’s U.S.-ASEAN Special Summit, Cambodian Foreign Minister Prak Sokhonn stated that the Cambodian government is fully committed to an inclusive political process and freedom of expression.

In February, in response to concerns by visiting Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa ,​ who urged Cambodia to ensure that the upcoming elections are conducted democratically, Hun Sen instructed local authorities not to disturb the activities of opposition parties prior to the election. “I call on the authorities at all levels to make it easy for political parties that will join the upcoming elections to have an opportunity to gather without any disturbance, to prevent the elections from violence,” he said during the inauguration of two Japanese-funded bridges.

The eventual outcome largely hinges on two factors. First is the question of whether Western governments are willing and able to become more flexible in their approach toward Cambodia, and accept something short of fully “free and fair” elections, in the interests of moderating Phnom Penh’s current heavy reliance on China.

Second is whether the CPP is able to permit more political freedoms without threatening a repeat of the 2013 national election, when the new CNRP shocked Hun Sen’s party by making significant gains. A stable and predictable political environment are particularly important this electoral cycle, given the coming handover of power from Hun Sen to his eldest son, Hun Manet, which is most likely to happen at some point between the 2023 and 2028 elections.

It is a fine needle to thread: demonstrating substantial democratic progress to external constituencies while maintaining an ultimate veto over the direction of Cambodian politics. This is something that Hun Sen has done repeatedly in the recent past, but whether he is able to restage the act one last time, in an era of increasing strategic turbulence and growing Western suspicion, remains to be seen.