FUNCINPEC
푼신펙
A Cambodian royalist party founded by Norodom Sihanouk in 1981 as a resistance movement against the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. Its name is the French acronym for “National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia”. It won the most seats in the UN-supervised election of 1993 and co-led the government with the Cambodian People’s Party, but its strength declined after the armed clashes of 1997.
In depth
According to the English source, Sihanouk founded the royalist resistance movement FUNCINPEC on 21 March 1981 in Pyongyang, North Korea. The Khmer source gives the place as Paris and the date as February 1981, and says a central committee was formed from 100 prominent exiled Khmers. On 22 June 1982 FUNCINPEC formed the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, a government-in-exile, with Son Sann’s Khmer People’s National Liberation Front (KPNLF) and the Khmer Rouge, and Sihanouk became its president. In September that year pro-FUNCINPEC resistance armies merged into the Armée Nationale Sihanoukiste (ANS).
In August 1989 Sihanouk stepped down as FUNCINPEC president and was succeeded by Nhiek Tioulong, while his son Norodom Ranariddh became secretary-general. Sihanouk gave up his party membership in July 1991 to become chairman of the Supreme National Council, and Ranariddh signed the Paris Peace Accords for the party in October that year. Ranariddh was elected president in February 1992, and in August the party registered formally as a political party under the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).
In the May 1993 election FUNCINPEC won 45.47 percent of the vote and 58 of 120 seats, and formed a coalition government with the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) in which Ranariddh became First Prime Minister and Hun Sen Second Prime Minister. In July 1997, however, forces aligned with the two sides clashed in Phnom Penh, and Ranariddh was ousted. After coming second in the 1998 election it became the CPP’s junior coalition partner, and in 2006 Ranariddh was ousted from the party by Nhek Bun Chhay.
Its vote and seats then fell in the elections of 2003, 2008 and 2013, and in 2013 it won no seats in the National Assembly. Ranariddh returned as president in January 2015, and in the 2018 election the party came second to the CPP but won no seats.