Tonga’s king an incompetent prime minister
Anti-democratic, unpopular, current monarch forced out as premier
As Tonga’s 106,000 people try to make sense of a power tussle between the monarch and his government, it’s mostly forgotten that with a different name King Tupou VI was for a time a deeply unpopular and incompetent prime minister of the kingdom.
Perhaps the people who have not forgotten it are current Prime Minister Hu’akavameiliku (aka Siaosi Sovaleni) and his cabinet who, in a potentially dangerous action, have dismissed, and will ignore, fatwas issued by the king and his Privy Council. The economic consequences of following the advice of the 64-year-old king have already been demonstrated. Yet in this royal chess game, the next move is over to the king.
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