Despite the hopes once held for it by the international community, Cambodia’s long slide into becoming one-party state is now effectively complete. Cambodia’s Prime Minister, Hun Sen, has announced that the opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) will be banned and that its seats will be redistributed among other parties, including his governing Cambodian People’s […]
Tag Archives: opposition
Blighted by anti-colonial war, revolution, a genocidal regime and then a civil war, it was hoped that the United Nations intervention in Cambodia a quarter of a century ago would result in a stable multi-party democracy. In recent days, however, Cambodia’s long slide back towards naked dictatorship has become all but complete. Last weekend, Cambodia’s […]
Timor-Leste went into the 2017 parliamentary elections with a general expectation that the two major parties, CNRT and Fretilin, would continue to dominate the small country’s politics and return to the coalition they had since 2015. That coalition gave Timor-Leste stability and promised stability into the future, if at the expense of a viable opposition. […]
Timor-Leste goes to the polls on Monday to elect a new president. After a profoundly troubled history, this small and still impoverished country the election should, happily, be relatively unproblematic. The elections have so far seen limited conflict, with a Fretilin-PD disturbance in Dili’s outer west reportedly leaving some homes burned. Election rallies have otherwise […]
Desperate times, they say, call for desperate measures. Proposing to cut $400 million from Australia’s aid budget to Indonesia’s schools program looks pretty desperate. So one can only assume that having alienated damp Queensland voters and not just a few Victorians, Tony Abbott is trying to find a way out of opposing the one-off tax […]