Word: sihanouk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Clean Sweep. More than half a million' others, 60% of the electorate, also voted. Their ballots gave a clean sweep to the firmly anti-Communist Sangkum (Socialist People's Community) Party, organized only six months ago by popular, chubby 32-year-old ex-King Norodom Sihanouk. The neutralist Democratic Party, which controlled the last National Assembly before its dissolution in 1952, polled a mere 18% of the votes. The Communists got almost none except in their stronghold of Kampot, shared with other minor parties only some 12%. Sangkum candidates won all 91 seats in the new Assembly...
...explanation was chiefly that in a brief time Sihanouk had built the Sangkum into a well-oiled political machine, with party committees in every village. Already revered when king, he seized the common touch by barnstorming in a red convertible and scattered his message by sound truck and radio (TIME, Sept...
...vowed, when he abdicated, never to return to power. He is not now a candidate for office. But he founded and now heads the Sangkum Party-the Socialist People's Community-which he hopes will capture a majority of the National Assembly's 91 seats. Sihanouk, whose portrait is the party's symbol, stands for a strengthened parliamentary monarchy for the central government at Pnompenh and "democracy at a level the people can understand," i.e., provincial assemblies to run local affairs and to check up on delegates to Pnompenh...
Rival Among Ruins. Chief opposition comes from the Democratic Party, whose symbol is a trumpeting elephant, and whose nominal chief is Sihanouk's cousin, His Highness Prince Phorissara. Deep in the jungle, however, somewhere near the ruins of ancient Angkor Wat, hides the Democrats' moving spirit, an old enemy of the ex-King. Son Ngoc Thanh was Japan's puppet Premier of Cambodia in World War II, when ex-King Sihanouk was only in his early twenties. Since then, besides being pro-Japanese, Thanh has been pro-French, anti-French, pro-American, anti-American, pro-King...
Thanh's Democrats, mostly city dwellers who want power in their own hands, stand for abolishing the monarchy in favor of a republic. To Sihanouk, that is an invitation to corruption and chaos among his politically unschooled people. Says he: "We cannot afford the luxury of a republic...