Cambodia's two largest opposition parties – the
Sam Rainsy Party and the
Human Rights Party – yesterday announced plans to merge into a single entity: the Cambodia Democratic Movement of National Rescue.
“In
the near future, there will be one new main opposition political party
as the result of a merger between the SRP and HRP,” HRP leader Kem Sokha
said in a video conference with SRP chief Sam Rainsy, who echoed those
thoughts just moments later.
Speaking from Manila, where their
parties had just concluded a two-day meeting at SRP headquarters there,
the two politicos said they intended to run candidates under the
National Rescue banner in the 2013 national elections, though they were
hesitant to offer a precise launch date for the new party.
Rainsy
will serve as president of the National Rescue party and Sokha will be
vice president; however, finer details of the party’s structure and
composition have yet to be finalised.
In a joint statement yesterday, Rainsy and Sokha “absolutely insisted” on a change in the composition of the
National Election Committee and an “overhaul of the current complicated election procedures that make voting unnecessarily difficult”.
Rainsy
said change would be swift and that if reform of the NEC was timely, he
would return to Cambodia from his self-imposed exile in France in time
for the 2013 elections.
“Our nation is drowning in disaster. The
country is under the dictatorship of a leader who serves only the
interests of foreign invaders,” Rainsy said during the press conference.
“We
are proud that we have reached an agreement to serve the desire of
Cambodian people who want to see one strong opposition party in order to
rescue our nation from suffering,” Sokha added.
However, the
National Rescue party is likely to face an uphill battle, commentators
said yesterday.Election monitoring group Comfrel’s president, Koul
Panha, said Rainsy and Sokha would have to be strategic about when and
how they registered their new party so as not to lose seats already held
by the SRP and HRP at the commune and national levels.
“If you
merge as one party, it means the other party will lose all its seats,”
Panha explained. “This is why they have to create three parties. Maybe
they need to wait until 2017 [the next commune council election year] to
dissolve the SRP and HRP, which have commune council seats now.”
In
the recent June 3 elections, the SRP won 20.8 per cent of the popular
vote and the HRP won 9.8. It was the first election in which the HRP
candidates had run.
A merger between the two parties has been
bandied about for years, but concrete moves toward a merger began after
the success of HRP in the commune council elections – success the party
would be eager to protect in the restrictive legal framework of party
mergers.
Tep Nytha, secretary-general of the NEC, reiterated that
the Law on Political Parties states that individual political parties
can establish their alliances, or a new political party, but if the two
political parties merge into one with a new name, they must register and
coordinate with the Ministry of Interior.
The potential
confusion of forming a third party while the two opposition parties
still exist means the move would need to be clearly explained to the
populace, Puthea Hang, director of the Neutral and Impartial Committee
for Free Elections in Cambodia, said yesterday.
“If they want to
build a unique party, they need to build the confidence of the people
before the general election,” Puthea said. “And there is not enough time
to campaign totally.
“They need more time and more discussion,” he added.
If
the structure of the National Rescue party is settled between Rainsy
and Sokha and an aggressive campaign is successfully implemented, the
new party could perform quite well in the upcoming national elections,
Comfrel’s Panha reasoned.
“There could be an increase in
confidence among supporters, it could re-energise people who had lost
hope of real change and encourage those frustrated people to the polls,”
Panha said.
Voter turnout for the recent commune elections was
the lowest in years, with only about 60 per cent of the population
casting a ballot.