Hun Sen, Cambodia’s ruler, has been in power too long

A COUNTRY boy, Hun Sen gets up early and works hard. He is said to spend hours every morning on his treadmill, to counter the ravages of his earlier years as a field commander and chain-smoker. Like the best autocrats, Cambodia’s prime minister understands the importance of social media. Aware that dull state television repels viewers, he lives on Facebook, buying what followers he cannot attract—he now has 9.6m of them.

He also attends to his constituents. Twice a week he goes down to the garment factories that have burgeoned around the edges of Phnom Penh, the capital. They were once a heartland for the opposition, the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP). But he now delivers long, exhortatory speeches to the textile workers, without notes. He has put up their minimum wage to $170 a month, provided health care and even promised maternity leave.

Since you cannot be too careful, Mr Hun Sen has also abolished the opposition. In November the Supreme Court agreed that the CNRP was part of a foreign plot to overthrow the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). Many members have fled the country. Those who remain are disqualified from running in elections in July. Since September the CNRP’s president, Kem Sokha, has been in detention without trial. Anyone who crosses power is at risk. In 2016 Kem Ley, an activist and outspoken critic, was shot dead in broad daylight.

Just getting started

Though Mr Hun Sen has ruled for 33 years, as strongmen go he is a whippersnapper at 65. He will need to live half as long again to be of Robert Mugabe’s vintage. He made his mark as a commander for the genocidal agrarian utopians of the Khmers Rouges, losing his eye and gaining his glassy squint during their assault on Phnom Penh in 1975. Two years later, as the regime’s purges intensified, he fled with his battalion over the border to Vietnam. In 1979 he returned with an invading Vietnamese army.

Mr Hun Sen was made foreign minister in the new puppet government before he was even 30—picked out because, though uneducated, he was a quick study and always attentive to Vietnamese interests. By 1985 he was prime minister, a post he refused to give up even after UN-supervised elections in 1993 produced a hung parliament with the royalist party, FUNCINPEC, holding the largest number of seats. He grudgingly shared power with the royalists’ leader, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, until 1997, when he ousted him in what was, in essence, a lightning civil war.

Prince Ranariddh has recently made his peace with the strongman. He spends languid days with cigars and claret at the colonial-era Raffles Hotel. His even softer-edged half-brother, Norodom Sihamoni, who studied film-making in Pyongyang and taught ballet in Paris, is the titular king. But Mr Hun Sen is the real one. His regal paternalism is intended to suggest that an earlier order has been restored after decades of horrors, from American bombing in the early 1970s to the civil war of the 1980s, not to mention the Khmers Rouges’ grotesque Year Zero.

Mr Hun Sen, along with his overcoiffed wife, Bun Rany, sit at the centre of cosmic relations like the rulers of old Angkor, as Sebastian Strangio puts it in “Hun Sen’s Cambodia”. The roads, pagodas and, above all, the thousands of “Hun Sen schools” are proof of his virtue. The website of the Cambodian Red Cross, of which Ms Bun Rany is honorary head, is a paean to her saintliness as she tends to her poor.

“Meritorious benefactors”, among them tycoons and government officials (the distinction not always clear), contribute to Mr Hun Sen’s beloved projects and are awarded ornate titles and sinecures in return. Authority is handed down and money up, the whole elite nexus of business and political families cemented through tactical marriages. It is such families’ wealth—made, out of sight, from deals in banking, agribusiness, logging, resource extraction and the like—that clogs Phnom Penh’s streets with supersized SUVs.

With the economy growing by almost 7% a year, some analysts are ready to overlook the elites’ excesses. Yet Hunsenomics carries costs. A ravaged natural environment is one, high-handed land grabs from subsistence farmers another. The counterpoint to what Mr Strangio calls the elites’ “mirage money” is real money draining out of the formal economy. Handing tycoons the right to import and sell cigarettes or booze on favourable terms means less tax revenue. Those Hun Sen schools are crumbling, and pupils hoping to pass their exams have to bribe ill-paid teachers. The poorest get little health care. Inequality remains extreme. Even Mr Hun Sen’s minimum wage for garment workers risks pricing the country’s only competitive industry out of global markets.

Meanwhile, as the election approaches, foreign criticism of Mr Hun Sen’s shutdown of democracy continues. Last weekend protests railed against him on the fringes of a South-East Asian summit hosted in Australia. He affects not to care. The old fox is surely right in calculating that Europe will not end preferential access for Cambodian textile exports. More important, he has China at his back, providing money and (a)moral support. Yet Cambodia’s international isolation is growing. Even members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations have harsh words in private about his sycophantically pro-China stance.

As for his grip at home, some wonder whether it is quite as sure as it seems. Last year his veteran henchman, Sok An, died of ill health, and he appears to feel the loss profoundly. Sok An, moreover, was one of the few who knew how to handle Mr Hun Sen’s increasingly erratic temper. The expansion of the CPP’s central committee last year by more than 300 cronies smacks of trying to please everyone. The government is packed with enough dead wood as it is. Fawning courtiers orbiting a king and his consort: that is no way to run a country. Whenever and however Mr Hun Sen goes, he will have been on the throne too long.