The winner of next week’s election is clear, but the long-serving PM will face challenges in handing power to his eldest son while avoiding significant internal conflicts.

Cambodia’s long-time head of government had not seen this coming. At the end of June, a good three weeks before the parliamentary elections, Facebook announced that it would suspend the account of Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has 14 million followers, for six months. The reason for this was a speech by Hun Sen in January, in which he threatened political opponents with violence, and which has since been publicly accessible as a video. The independent Oversight Board of Facebook’s parent company Meta considered this to be a violation of the user guidelines. To at least mitigate the loss of face of a ban, Hun Sen unceremoniously deleted his profile and the thousands of posts he had published there since 2016.

Read the full analysis on https://thediplomat.com/2023/07/in-cambodia-hun-sen-searches-for-the-magic-political-formula/