Saturday, 24 May 2008

CPP's New Strategy

CPP's new strategy: disenfranchisement of non-CPP voters (2)

It has become obvious now that the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) is implementing a new strategy, which was successfully tested in 2007, to secure another election victory even before Voting Day on 27 July 2008. In the voter list "clean up" process conducted by the CPP-controlled National Election Committee (NEC), some 600,000 names have been deleted from the voter registry. Names which should be deleted (ghost voters, foreigners with no voting right) have been kept on the list whereas names of real and legitimate votes have been deleted because related to those identified by CPP-affiliated village chiefs as non-CPP supporters.

Over the last five years, from the 2002 commune elections to the 2007 commune elections, the CPP has dramatically lost ground. In 2007 as in 2002, the CPP collected 61 percent of the popular votes. But there is a big difference between the two elections: in 2007, the voter turnout was only 65 percent whereas it was 87 percent in 2002, meaning that support for the CPP computed on the basis of the whole electorate dropped from 53 percent in 2002 to 39 percent in 2007. It was only through a massive disenfranchisement of non-CPP voters that the CPP could maintain its positions. The CPP is resorting to the same strategy in 2008.

Sam Rainsy in Paris, Marseilles, Brussels, Belfast and Berlin (2)

Opposition leader Sam Rainsy is currently in Europe to take part in several events. He was in Paris and Brussels for the launch of his book "Des racines dans la pierre" (Rooted in the stone) and gave interviews to several radio and TV stations (*). On May 15 – 17, he attended a conference of Liberal International in Belfast (Northern Ireland, United Kingdom). On May 18, he joined the Cambodian community in Marseilles to celebrate Visak Bochea in a Cambodian pagoda where he met with SRP supporters from several towns in the South of France. He is now in Berlin to meet with German government.

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