Ruling Party Still Grabs Ground Power
Phnom Penh (7 June, 2012): Prime Minister Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) received a huge victory from the third commune/sangkat election on Sunday, beating its nine political competitors.
According to the preliminary results claimed by both CPP and the opposition parties, the ruling CPP has taken up to 72% of the commune/sangkat councilor seats and it is to control 1,593 out of the country’s 1,633 commune/sangkat chief positions while 22 positions or 21% are fallen to Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) and 18 to Human Rights Party (HRP), the party joined the election for the first time.
On 16 May, two days before the start of the 15-day election campaign (18 May-1 June), National Election Committee (NEC) Secretary General Tep Nitha told journalists at a roundtable discussion organized by Club of Cambodian Journalists that about 9.2 million people were registered and the number of female candidates increased up to 25% if compared with 16% in 2000 and 21% in 2007.
According to NEC, only 64% of the registered voters were shown up and voted on the Sunday’s election, brought down the number from 67% in 2007 and 87% in 2000.
Though the number of voters hugely declined this year — about 4 million registered voters could not vote — both CPP and NEC claimed that the election has been smooth and peaceful.
Cheam Yeap, CPP senior lawmaker, said it is the right of the people to decide to vote. “Cambodia is a democratic country. So it depends on the people. They go or don’t go to vote is their rights. Although we encourage them to vote, we can never force them or hold their hands to the polling stations,” he said by adding that CPP expressed deep thanks to more than 3.8 million people who voted for CPP on Sunday.
Thun Saray, president of local human right group Adhoc and director of the board at the Committee for Free and Fair Elections (Comfrel), told reporters that the lower turnout was because people lost their interest to see political change and they already see “the result before the election happened. It is one big party running against smaller parties, and they don’t want to come and vote, because they think that even if they vote, the CPP will in again.”
Koul Panha, Comfrel’s Executive Director, also echoed that some irregularities like in the 2007 election happened because the voters were unable to find their names in the approved-voter lists of NEC. He said that his Comfrel’s observers found that there were some technical problems.
NEC Chairman Im Suosdei agreed that there were people unable to vote while some others did not come to vote themselves. He said some registered voters came to the polling stations without any identity and when the election officials asked them to go back to bring such paper like “Identity Card or Family Book” to show if they were the real persons in the voting list, they went back but never returned.
Keo Phala, official in NEC’s legal department, also said that people’s moving from one place to another and people’s carelessness with their names on the voting lists also parts of bringing down the number of voters. However, he said, such problem was not the NEC’s fault because NEC announced many times on the issues.
So far, NEC has received 119 complaints in which 106 from SRP, 5 from CPP, 5 from HRP, 1 from a voter, 1 from the authorities running the elections, and 1 from FUNCIPEC party, Phala said by adding that the complaints ranged from interference in the voting process, missing names and even called for re-election, he added.
The Sunday’s election is the third time while the ruling CPP is challenging several problems such as land dispute and land grabbing, corruption, unemployment, partisanship in the state’s ministries and departments, impunity for criminals who are closed to the high ranking officials.
According to NEC, the official result is not coming out until 24 June.
