Sam Rainsy is the co-founder and interim leader of the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), the country’s major opposition, which was dissolved by Cambodia’s politically controlled supreme court in 2017. Rainsy served as finance minister from 1993–94 in a government formed after the 1993 United Nations-led polls. That government was overthrown in a violent coup in 1997, in which Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party seized power. Cambodia has not had another free and fair election since. Rainsy now lives in forced exile in Paris.
