Election fever

Today is Cambodia’s second ever Commune Council election day. Commune Councils make decisions affecting people at local Commune level, and are made up of elected members of the major political parties. CoDeC got involved in the run-up to the election, by organising candidate debates held in large Open Forums at three locations in Kompong Thom province, which were then broadcast on national radio stations. Prior to the Open Forums, we held meetings with the local communities to help them to prepare questions based on the issues most important to them to ask the candidates. At the beginning of each Forum, monks blessed the candidates and the debates were then strictly controlled by a neutral moderator. Democracy and free speech are still unfamiliar concepts in Cambodia, and these candidate debates were ground-breaking. Apart from our Open Forums, there has been a lot of political campaigning over the last two weeks. A huge cavalcade of trucks drove up and down the main streets on Friday to try to encourage people to vote for one of the parties. Polling closes at 3pm this afternoon, and the results will be posted on the doors of the polling stations one hour later. The British Embassy has encouraged foreigners to keep away from election events this weekend, although I don’t think there will be any trouble here in the Provinces.