Almost three years after a UN-sponsored election, the governing coalition put in place by King Norodom Sihanouk to avoid continuing civil war now seems set to disintegrate.
A recent national congress held by the royalist Funcinpec party has become a call to arms with the party's president, First Prime Minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh, threatening to pull out of the coalition and go for an early election if more power is not handed to him and his party.
'Funcinpec must be allowed to really run the country which is not the case after two years. From today we cannot accept this anymore,' Prince Ranariddh said at the congress' closing ceremony last Friday.
Until that congress, the 'marriage of convenience' between former battlefield enemies - the ex-communist Cambodian People's Party (CPP) and Funcinpec - had held firm with both premiers claiming they would continue the coalition well after elections scheduled for 1998.
The unlikely alliance was formed when elements within the powerful CPP, who had led Cambodia as a one-party state since 1979, refused to hand over power when Funcinpec, made up mainly of royalist resistance fighters, won the 1993 election.
For some observers, the threatened collapse of the coalition is a sign Cambodia's multi-party pluralism is finally coming of age. But among war-weary Cambodians, for whom the alliance represents political stability if not democracy, the fear is political change will turn to political violence.