Sokha pushes localised budgets
OPPOSITION leader Kem Sokha continued to push the party’s decentralisation platform yesterday on the campaign trail while declaring in an interview that the CNRP is aiming to win more than 60 percent of the votes cast at the June 4 commune elections.
Sokha has been travelling around the country in an effort to visit every province before voting day, and in Kampong Chhnang province yesterday morning he predicted that his proposal to give each commune $500,000 a year would win votes for the Cambodia National Rescue Party.
“Our plan is that we want to get more than 60 percent,” Sokha said in an interview after a campaign speech in the province’s rural Boribor district. “Our policies have hit the hearts of the people, because who does not want to develop their own communes?”
“This is a policy that the ruling party has never dared [to implement] for a very long time.”
Saying the people elected to their local councils would be better placed to develop their areas than bureaucrats i n t he c a pi t a l , Sokha announced the policy at the opening of the campaign period on Saturday.
With more than 1,600 commune councils across the country, the cost of the opposition’s policy would come to about 16 percent of this year’s $5 billion national budget. It would also require CONTINUED
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