The Candlelight Party ( km, គណបក្សភ្លើងទៀន) is a liberal party in

Cambodia Cambodia (; also Kampuchea ; km, កម្ពុជា, UNGEGN: ), officially the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country located in the southern portion of the Indochinese Peninsula in Southeast Asia, spanning an area of , bordered by Thailand ...

. The party was a member of the

Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats The Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats (CALD) is a regional organization of liberal democratic political parties in Asia. Background The Council was created on 15 October 1993, in a meeting in Taipei, Taiwan. There are nine member partie ...

Liberal International Liberal International (LI) is a worldwide organization of liberal political parties - a political international. It was founded in Oxford in 1947 and has become the pre-eminent network for liberal parties, aiming to strengthen liberalism aroun ...

, and the Alliance of Democrats. It is the largest opposition party in Cambodia, and the main challenger to the ruling Cambodian People's Party. The party resumed political activity in October 2021 after being inactive since 2012. The party, founded in 1995 as the Khmer Nation Party, renamed the Sam Rainsy Party in 1998, and recently in 2018, it was renamed the Candlelight Party. This party is currently the official opposition to the ruling Cambodian People's Party. Since the decline of the junior coalition partner, FUNCINPEC, in the 2008

National Assembly In politics, a national assembly is either a unicameral legislature, the lower house of a bicameral legislature, or both houses of a bicameral legislature together. In the English language it generally means "an assembly composed of the r ...

elections, the Candlelight Party is now considered the second largest party and the largest opposition party in

. The party won 15 of the 123 seats in the National Assembly in the 1998 elections, 24 seats in the 2003 elections, and 26 seats in the 2008 elections. The CP won two seats in the 2006 Senate elections. In 2009, it formally allied with the Human Rights Party in the Democratic Movement of Change. In 2008, party activist Tuot Saron was arrested on a charge of "being an accomplice to unlawful confinement". International human rights groups including

Human Rights Watch Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an international non-governmental organization, headquartered in New York City, that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. The group pressures governments, policy makers, companies, and individual human ...

and

Amnesty International Amnesty International (also referred to as Amnesty or AI) is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The organization says it has more than ten million members and s ...

described the charges as a politically motivated attempt to intimidate other SRP activists. Tuot Saron was released on 26 November 2010, following a Royal Pardon decree.

Election results

General elections

Communal elections

Senate elections

References

External links