Top opposition leader kept off ballot in Cambodia

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Cambodia’s election committee on Tuesday rejected a top candidate from the country’s main opposition party and said the party must correct several things before its candidates can be allowed to run in the July 23 parliamentary elections.
The decision comes a day after Monday’s deadline for parties to submit applications to participate in the vote that Prime Minister Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party is widely expected to win.
The CPP already controls all 125 seats in the National Assembly – a stranglehold that the opposition Candlelight Party hopes to crack at least a bit.
But authorities are making it difficult for the Candlelight Party to run for the election. The National Election Committee has not approved its application to field candidates in July.
On Tuesday, Rong Chhun, the party’s vice president and a prominent labor activist who joined the Candlelight Party in January, was barred from being listed as the party’s top candidate in Kandal province due to a prior conviction, said the committee’s secretary general, Tep Nytha.
In August 2021, Rong Chhun was sentenced to two years in prison for criticizing the government’s failure to address disputes over Cambodia’s shared border with Vietnam. He was later ordered to serve for 15 months, with the remainder of the sentence suspended with a three-year probation.
“He was convicted and has not been rehabilitated,” Tep Nytha wrote in a statement.
Versus Hun Sen
Rong Chhun would have been on the ballot opposite Hun Sen, who is running as the CPP’s top candidate in Kandal, which surrounds the capital of Phnom Penh.
Rong Chhun said he was allowed to vote in last year’s commune elections. If that wasn’t a probation violation, then running as a candidate this year also shouldn’t be a problem, he told Radio Free Asia.
The party will have no option but to remove him from its candidate list, said spokesman Kim Sour Phirith.
“It is sad that the NEC won’t allow him to run,” he said. “Election law says Rong Chhun can run, but this was just an excuse.”
The Candlelight Party submitted its application to the election commission on Saturday after the Ministry of Interior issued a statement recognizing the party.
The party had lost its original statement from the ministry during a 2017 raid on the offices of the Cambodia National Rescue Party, which at the time was the country’s leading opposition party before it was shut down by the Supreme Court. The party had received 44 percent of the votes in the 2013 general election, but was unable to run in the 2018 elections.
The election commission still needs a copy of the Ministry of Interior"s statement and has asked that the party also provide a copy of the receipt showing it paid 15 million riel (about US$3,600) to register.
Another key opposition figure, Sam Rainsy, who lives in self-imposed exile in France, urged the international community not to recognize the results of the July 23 election, which he said would be a sham.
This year’s election is “shaping up along the usual lines” compared to 2018, the Sam Rainsy wrote in an op-ed for Nikkei Asia on Tuesday.
“There will not be any surprises when the votes are counted,” he wrote. “The presence of a small symbolic opposition allows Hun Sen to present a facade of democracy to dampen international criticism.”
Translated by Samean Yun. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.