Cambodia’s opposition should use its wild years to regain its footing

The biggest electoral successes against the CPP came in 1993, when the royalist Funcinpec defeated the CPP, and in 2013, when the now-banned Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) finished just 4.4 percentage points behind the ruling party. But both achievements came after many years in the desert. For most Funcinpec officials in 1993, that meant physical exile during the Kampuchean People’s Socialist Republic era in the 1980s. For the CNRP in 2013 it meant, after a dismal performance in 2008, the slow unification of the opposition parties and, once again, personal exile.

However, those periods of weakness allowed both parties to build a genuine movement and a coherent base. When Funcinpec won the 1993 elections (the first democratic vote in decades, if ever, in Cambodia) it had solid support from royalists, non-communists, professionals, and returnees. For the CNRP in 2013, it was the unions, the emerging urban working classes (mostly garment workers), urban liberals, disaffected professionals, and the diaspora.

decimated civil society

But with the collapse of Funcinpec as an electoral force in the early 2000s, many royalists ended up with the CPP, as did many professionals. For the CNRP, which was forcibly dissolved in 2017, the deal was slightly different. After nearly losing the 2013 general election, the ruling CPP did something different: He attacked his opponent’s base and co-opted swathes of it.

The union movement and much of civil society have been decimated. The CNRP’s activist core has been harassed, imprisoned or forced into exile. Yet at the same time, the CPP massively raised the minimum wage for garment workers from $80 a month in 2013 to around $200 today, though most of the credit should go to workers and unions.

now there is a social welfare system and cash transfers to the poor that was not even imaginable in 2013. The government bureaucracy was (partly) opened up to competent officials who lacked the patronage that typically decided promotions. Hun Manet, the future Prime Minister, has worked hard (and allegedly spent a lot of money) on courting the diaspora.

However, the opposition has not advanced psychologically since 2017. There were hopes that Sam Rainsy would. return to Cambodia in 2019 to potentially spark a wave of discontent (or, at the very least, renew opposition morale). Some still think that Kem Sokha, the CNRP leader arrested for treason, will be released or pardoned and return as a party leader. Now the opposition movement is bogged down, hoping for a the status quo that’s really not coming back.

There must also be an acknowledgment that it has to rebuild, take root and branch out, come back to being a movement with a new base, not a hierarchical political party. As in the past, that base will be largely determined by those who do not feel represented by the ruling party, especially now that it is going through a challenging succession of leadership that will throw up new contradictions and grievances.

The fight against corruption will probably be a key issue. Hun Sen has convinced other CPP elites to accept his dynastic succession with the promise that all of his sons and younger relatives will also rise in rank. That’s picking up pace right now. But increasing corruption will follow, as the Hun family knows.

Many of the previously unionized garment workers remain loyal, as do sections of the diaspora, which are the main donors to opposition circles. But an opposition movement also needs to win over the professional middle classes, the kind who are up to their necks in debt. Environmentalism could be a key pillar.

Political agenda and experience

The most important thing is a positive agenda, which is not just the anti-CPP vote. You will have to get rid of anti vietnamese hate that has dominated opposition politics for decades. He will also have to be smarter when talking about China. It is not enough to say that Cambodia is the “colony” of Beijing. No serious thinking person believes that Cambodia can break its deals with China, and certainly not as forcefully as some in the opposition seem to think.

What a new opposition movement must do is become more serious. Any opposition party implicitly asks the Cambodian people to take a huge leap of faith by not re-electing a party that has been in power since 1979 and claims (arguably) to have been instrumental in ensuring peace and relative prosperity.

But for too long opposition parties (and that includes the Candlelight Party) offered promises, not manifestos, leading many to believe (not unreasonably) that they would decide on a real program once they came to power. No shadow cabinet; no announcement of which politicians would become which minister and why; no indication that their candidates are more experienced or talented than the CPP ministers.

A renewed opposition movement has to compete with the experienced government. The transition to a Hun Manet government is to open a chapter to a younger generation that the ruling party says is the best and the brightest, who will claim their legitimacy from good governance. Whatever the reality of that, a renewed opposition movement must also make competition and public trust central to its message. That may take some time, something will have.

David Hutt is a journalist and analyst. He is a research fellow at the Institute for Central European Asian Studies (CEIAS), a Southeast Asia columnist for Diplomat and a correspondent for the Asia Times. He resided in Cambodia between 2014 and 2019.