Uummm… fresh paper smell.

From the article:

Cambodia’s newly re-elected prime minister, Hun Sen, has confirmed he will hand over the premiership to his son, Hun Manet, in August after 38 years at the top of the country’s politics. Hun Sen, who has been at the helm of the Cambodian government since 1985, won a “landslide” general election victory on July 23.

That general election, the seventh of Cambodia’s modern era, was designed to display a transition of sorts back to a multi-party democracy after the country became a one-party state in 2018. The five seats won by the royalist Funcinpec party are claimed to be (token) evidence of this. In reality, the power of the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) is unfettered.

A common mantra in Hun Sen’s rhetoric is “peace and stability”, something that particularly resonates with the prime minister’s contemporaries. But the reality of life in Cambodia is quite different – barely 10% of its population were adults when Hun Sen first became prime minister. For the few old enough to remember life before, it was a period of scarcely imaginable horrors – famine, civil war, and the genocidal “killing fields” regime of the Khmer Rouge.

Hun Sen himself served with the Khmer Rouge in the early years of the regime, later fleeing to Vietnam. He returned to Cambodia with the Vietnamese invasion of 1978 and took the position of foreign minister – before, in 1985, becoming prime minister.

A UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia (Untac) was created in 1992 to oversee the Comprehensive Political Settlement of the Cambodia Conflict, with the withdrawal of all foreign forces and the first democratic elections of the modern era in 1993.

That election was actually won by Funcinpec, but Hun Sen rejected the result and negotiated a role for himself as the country’s second prime minister. He consolidated his position with a coup in 1997, and his CPP party has won every subsequent election.