CPP to conduct primary elections
THE Cambodian People’s Party will hold primary elections next month to select the party’s candidates for the June 4 elections in the nation’s 1,646 communes, spokesman Sok Eysan said yesterday, calling the move a part of “the CPP’s policy of democracy”.
The ruling party currently holds 1,592 commune councils compared with the 40 held by the Cambodia National Rescue Party – with 14 new communes to be created – but the June 2012 commune elections took place at a lowpoint for the since resurgent, and unified, opposition.
Eysan said the CPP’s central committee congress in Phnom Penh on December 17 and 18 had sent the message to the party’s commune leaders that they had to hold votes to select their list of candidates – including for commune chief – sometime next month.
“It instructed each commune to do this by themselves, and that it must be done in January,” Eysan said. “They will take the lists of candidates who have been voted in through the commune congress to submit it to the top leaders to be checked.”
“In the CPP’s policy of democracy, there is voting, and all the commune congresses must be done in January,” he said, noting that National Military Police commander Sao Sokha already ran one vote in Svay Rieng province on Saturday because he would be busy with military work next month.
CNRP spokesman Yim Sovann said that the opposition has a more decentralised CONTINUED
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