Phnom Penh Post
Senate President
Chea Sim offers rice to a Buddhist monk during a ceremony at his Phnom
Penh home in August 2012. Photograph: Heng Chivoan/Phnom Penh Post
In August, Cambodian People Party (CPP) stalwart Chea Sim, who as
Senate president has long remained out of the limelight, made a rare
gesture toward the Fourth Estate: he opened his Phnom Penh villa to
members of the media. At the lavish Choul Vassa ceremony hosted by Chea
Sim, reporters sat side-by-side with ministers and oknhas to watch the
80-year-old and his family receive blessings from the country’s
highest-ranking monks.
At the end of the ceremony, the shaky though not evidently unwell
Chea Sim made his way to a plush chair and began handing out offerings
to the attendees. The monks and nuns shuffled by and graciously accepted
envelopes. Then came the laypeople, staff and poor, sampeahing [Khmer-style greeting] as they
passed. Finally, after everyone had gone, the journalists queued up one
by one to receive their envelopes of cash.
Along with the invitation came an implicit statement.
Despite rumours that had been swirling in the media for a week that
the perennially ill CPP president had passed away, Chea Sim was not
going anywhere.
It was hardly surprising the rumours of Chea Sim’s death garnered so
much attention. Indeed, in a year of two elections, it was without a
doubt the sideshow that made for the biggest political stories of 2012.
After years of engaging in a maddening dance, the opposition Sam
Rainsy and Human Rights parties finally merged in July, paving the way
for a much-needed united front come next year’s National Election.
Prince Norodom Ranariddh was pushed from his eponymous party, which
rapidly changed name, president and leadership, only to become subsumed
under the royalist Funcinpec just a day after the official dissolution.
Within the ruling Cambodian Peoples Party, meanwhile, the rumblings
were far quieter, but they too surfaced on occasion. Spilling over from
the previous year, those closest to Chea Sim continued to face
retribution for a raft of embezzlement crimes.
The year opened with a highly predictable Senate race, criticised
from the get-go by election monitors who have long called for reform of
the process. On January 29, in a non-universal election open only to
commune councillors, the vote fell exactly along party lines, with 46
seats going to the CPP and 11 to the SRP.
While accusations of vote buying and allegiance swearing were rife,
the strongest criticisms continued to be directed at the activity
itself. With more than $500,000 expended on an election with a known
outcome, many have questioned the point, while monitors once again urged
for constitutional amendments that would open voting to a broader
populace. As in previous mandates, however, such calls fell on deaf
ears, as did calls to altogether reform the Senate, which serves as
little more than a rubber stamp.
If Senate elections were de rigueur, however, the commune council
elections held four months later proved anything but. Yes, the CPP
retained its high margin of victory, winning 97 per cent of the
country’s commune chief positions. Yes, its seats increased, as they
have ever since the first vote in 2002. But despite the foreseeable
outcomes, there were hints change was afoot.
Running for the first time, the opposition HRP, did far better than
anyone would have predicted, winning control of 18 communes and gaining
800 seats overall. The SRP, though it dipped from 2,660 seats to 2,155
and lost six of their 28 commune chief positions, saw significant gains
in previous CPP strongholds where land disputes had grown rampant in
recent years.
The CPP’s royalist coalition partners both suffered heavy blows, with
Funcinpec dropping by more than a third to just 151 seats and the NRP
winning less than an eighth of what they held in the previous vote,
winding up with only 52 seats.
Meanwhile, brushed over by a ruling party keen to highlight its
victory, the voter turnout figure was pounced upon by political analysts
and opposition members alike. In a country where startlingly high
turnout is a given in every election, only 64 per cent turned up at the
polls, compared with 68 per cent in 2007 and 87 per cent in the first,
2002, election, according to COMFREL figures.
Many pegged the dropping turnout figure as an effective blow to the
ruling party – a statement that voters either actively wished not to
vote for the CPP, or felt too uncomfortable to cast their vote for an
opponent.
Echoing the conclusion of many monitors, UN Special Rapporteur Surya
Subedi listed the decrease among his key concerns in a report penned
shortly after the election.
“There are several reasons why an individual may choose to opt out of
participating in the electoral process. In many cases, however, people
do not choose to abandon their right to vote, but face such significant
barriers that they are effectively disenfranchised,” he wrote.
For longtime observers, the 2012 commune election proved a complex
one to parse. Unlike in previous elections, there were few overt acts of
political violence or intimidation. But the vote came halfway through
an intensely uneasy year, in which large-scale clampdowns by the
authorities had grown endemic.
Pushed to the fore, land issues exploded into violence at an
altogether new frequency and scale; with a number of headline-grabbing
crackdowns coming just weeks before the elections sending a message,
some believe, to would-be opposition activists.
It is perhaps that very atmosphere of increasing unrest among both
the populace and the government that forced the opposition parties’
hand. After years of bickering and in-fighting that saw proposed mergers
fail repeatedly, to the surprise of many, the SRP and HRP in July
managed to broker a successful union.
Proposed shortly before the election, the idea of a merger rapidly
gained momentum after the polls closed. Though neither party alone made
monumental inroads (the SRP lost seats while the HRP’s wins remained
relatively minimal), it quickly became clear that a combined force would
have made an admirable show, taking 30 per cent of the vote.
In July, HRP President Kem Sokha and SRP President Sam Rainsy met in
the Philippines to iron out the details, and by early October the newly
formed Cambodian National Rescue Party had been successfully registered
with the Ministry of Interior and begun rolling out its party platform.
While CPP officials have pooh-poohed the merger, insisting it won’t
make a dent on the party’s steady gains, analysts have been sanguine.
Meanwhile, buttressed by increasingly high-level support from the
international community, the self-exiled Rainsy has grown more confident
by the day that the new party will prove successful and that he will be
permitted to return to Cambodia prior to the election.
Rainsy, who lives in Paris and faces 12 years in prison on forgery
and destruction of property charges, popularly dismissed as politically
motivated, can now likely count among his supporters US President Barack
Obama.
During a closed-door bilateral meeting that took place in November on
the sidelines of an ASEAN summit, Obama highlighted the need for
“opposition parties to be able to operate”, according to the White
House.
But while the opposition merger was widely lauded, the other major party merger was less of a coup for those involved.
But while the opposition merger was widely lauded, the other major party merger was less of a coup for those involved.
After struggling to maintain relevance and suffering a major blow in
the election, the Norodom Ranariddh Party succumbed in August to intense
infighting that concluded with Prince Ranariddh virtually ousted from
the party and the resignations of a number of key members.
After months of mounting acrimony over the direction the party had
been taken, Prince Ranariddh was forced to step down and his close
associates made to follow suit. The NRP was then rapidly remade as the
Nationalist Party and, almost as quickly, subsumed by Funcinpec – with
whom lower-level party officials had been negotiating for months.
Whether the merger will prove to be the ticket to revive the badly
suffering royalists remains to be seen. But if the past year of politics
has proved anything, it’s that once the sideshow gets going, stasis
can’t be taken for granted.
To contact the reporter on this story: Abby Seiff at
abby.seiff@phnompenhpost.com
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