By THOMAS FULLER
Published: July 29, 2013
The New York Times
PHNOM PENH — Cambodia faced a volatile and possibly prolonged political standoff on Monday after leaders of the opposition said they rejected the preliminary results of Sunday’s election and accused the authoritarian government of Prime Minister Hun Sen of large-scale cheating.
Mak Remissa/European Pressphoto Agency
Sam Rainsy, the president of the Cambodia National Rescue Party, said on Monday at a news conference that his party "cannot accept the result" of the election.
“We will not accept the result — we cannot accept the result,” Sam Rainsy, leader of the newly energized opposition, said Monday at a news conference. “The party in power cannot ignore us any more.”
The governing Cambodian People’s Party issued a statement late on Sunday saying that preliminary results “clearly showed that the Cambodian People’s Party won a victory” and that the party had sufficient numbers to establish a new government.
The country’s information minister on Sunday said that the governing party had won 55 percent of the seats in the National Assembly – a relatively narrow victory and down from 73 percent of the seats in the last election, in 2008. Mr. Rainsy had initially claimed victory after polls closed Sunday, but then retracted his claim.
The opposition’s announcement on Monday that it would contest the results was partly motivated by calculations that cheating may have denied them victory, said Kem Sokha, the vice president of the main opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party.
“We have a chance to win,” Mr. Kem Sokha, said. “It’s never been this close in our history.”
Mr. Hun Sen, 60, has been in power for 28 years and Sunday’s election was one of the most closely contested of his career.
Mr. Kem Sokha appeared to issue a veiled threat to the government, saying he feared that “Cambodian people who don’t like the result will rise up and make chaos.”
The governing party’s statement on Sunday included an “appeal to all Cambodians to keep calm, maintain stability, security and good social order.” The opposition made a similar appeal for calm on Sunday.
The Cambodia National Rescue Party was founded last year through a merger with Mr. Rainsy’s party and has given the opposition a unified voice. It also effectively means that Cambodia has a two-party system for the first time since multiparty democracy was restored in the 1990s.
Mr. Rainsy called for a special committee to be formed to adjudicate the election. He proposed that the committee include members of both parties as well as independent election observers, both Cambodian and foreign.
A number of organizations monitoring the election have described widespread problems.
“We acknowledge that there were irregularities,” said Thun Saray, the president of the board of directors of Camfrel, a Cambodian election monitoring organization. Mr. Thun Saray said there were many reports of duplicates in the voter rolls that appeared to have allowed more than one vote per person.
Because of a stipulation in the Constitution that mandates a minimum presence in the National Assembly, the governing party would not be able to form a new government without the cooperation of the opposition, said Sok Sam Oeun, the executive director of the Cambodian Defenders Project, a charity that provides legal aid to the poor.
“The ball is in the opposition’s court,” he said.
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