Prince Yuthevong and his colleagues redrafted the somewhat royalist text of the constitution until it resembled the French constitution, which granted more power to an elected National Assembly than to the largely ceremonial chief of state. Although Yuthevong died suddenly in July 1947, the Democrats won the elections to the National Assembly held later in the year, capturing fifty-four seats out of a total of ninety. According to Keng Vannsak, who knew Saloth Sar and Ieng Sary in Paris in the early 1950s, the two young men worked for the Democratic party in this campaign.24

Between the elections and his departure for France on a scholarship in August 1949, Saloth Sar attended the Ecole Technique and sat for a lycée entrance examination, which he probably failed, in August 1948. This period was one of increasing turbulence on the Cambodian political scene. From 1947 to 1949 Sihanouk and the French became increasingly disenchanted with the Democrats. They suspected, correctly, that the party wanted to govern Cambodia without their supervision or advice. In 1947, before the assembly elections, the French jailed several members of the consultative assembly on trumped-up charges. The men were held for several months and some of them were tortured; they were never brought to trial and eventually were released. In 1948, following scandals involving members of the assembly, Sihanouk dissolved the body and began governing by decree, taking advice from party dissidents and members of parties that had failed to win any seats in 1947.

In the meantime, armed resistance to the French had broken out in the countryside. Some rebel bands were funded by the Thai and called themselves Khmer Issarak (“Liberated Khmers”); others were made up of former bandits and fugitives from the French police. In the areas bordering Vietnam, resistance was coordinated by the Indochina Communist party, which was dominated by the Vietnamese. Although the party had ostensibly been abolished in 1946 as part of a united front strategy to oppose the French, it had remained secretly in existence. As fighting intensified in Indochina, the party sought to enroll members from Laos and Cambodia as well as from Vietnam. Two of its most prominent Cambodian members, who joined the party during World War II, were former monks who took the revolutionary names of Son Ngoc Minh (Achar Mean) and Tou Samouth. Both men had been raised in southern Vietnam and were fluent in Vietnamese. By 1949 Tou Samouth was already playing a major role in the resistance, and he became Saloth Sar’s patron when Sar was a Communist militant in the 1950s. For the time being, however, the Democrats rather than the Indochina Communist party, and politics rather than armed struggle, attracted the loyalties of the educated Cambodian elite, including Saloth Sar.25