Cambodia has postponed its scheduled May election for at least two months, in a sign of continuing political turmoil after a coup in July.
The widely expected delay, endorsed in a parliamentary vote Friday, was the result of infighting and government paralysis that experts said had made it impossible to finance and prepare the election on time.
The difficult and expensive process of voter registration has not yet begun.
Political analysts and Cambodian politicians said the postponement might last longer, perhaps until next November, after the summer monsoon season.
The election would be the first since a 1993 vote that was supervised by the UN under a peace agreement that ended a decade of civil war and produced the country’s unwieldy coalition government.
The new time frame opens the field for the kind of intense maneuvering that preceded the coup in July, when one of
the country’s tandem prime ministers, Hun Sen, ousted his partner and rival, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, in two days of fighting.
