Cambodia PM officially wins poll

Hun Sen has vowed to stay in power even without a coalition

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen and his ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP) have officially won the country's general election.

The Cambodian electoral commission said that Hun Sen's party received 2.45m votes in last month's poll - just over 40% of the total.

Although the election took place on 27 July, official figures were only made available on Friday.

But it could be up to a month before the final allocation of seats in the 123-member national assembly is announced, due to Cambodia's complex proportional representation system.

The CPP claims it will score 73 seats in the assembly, a result that falls short of the two-thirds majority required to rule in its own right.

Correspondents say the major parties are likely to have already begun negotiations to form a coalition government.

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BBC correspondent Tony Cheng says that the CPP's victory is no surprise.

The big change, he says, is the rise of the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP), which has been in opposition for the last five years.

Election results Cambodian People's Party - 47.35% Sam Rainsy Party - 21.87% Funcinpec Party - 20.75%

It has succeeded in surpassing the royalist Funcinpec party for the first time, by a narrow margin of just over 50,000 votes.

Funcinpec has lost substantial ground in this election, and is likely to lose an estimated 17 seats in the assembly.

The party - led by Prince Norodom Ranariddh - will now have to decide whether to go back into government as a junior member of a coalition, or to join forces with the Sam Rainsy Party in opposition.

Both Funcinpec and the SRP have declared themselves dissatisfied with the way the electoral process was carried out, and have demanded a tripartite government without Hun Sen in charge.

But Hun Sen quickly rejected this idea, vowing to stay in power even if he could not find coalition partners to govern with.

Both so far there appears to be a political stalemate.

This year's elections were hailed as the most peaceful ever in Cambodia's troubled history.

But there are worries that continued wrangling over the makeup of the new assembly may lead to a repeat of the violent street protests seen after the last general election in 1998.