Its platform was populist, nationalist and anticommunist, Lon Nol being determined to oppose North Vietnamese and Chinese influence in the region in the context of the Second Indochina War: its three principal values were declared to be "republicanism, social responsibility and nationalism".
The party's main function, however, was to support and legitimise Lon Nol's leadership of the country; he was later to develop a rather ramshackle chauvinist and semi-mystical ideology called "Neo-Khmerism" to back his political agenda.
[5] The Dangrek faction, named after the mountain range in which Thanh's Khmer Serei guerrillas had been based, attracted those figures who had long been part of the republican and radical opposition to Prince Norodom Sihanouk in the period before the Republic's establishment.
In the elections to the Senate, the upper house of legislature, the 'token' opposition to the PSR was provided by a few candidates of the Sangkum, the former party of Sihanouk, who had been deposed as Head of State by Lon Nol in 1970.
[4] The PSR's Secretary-General, Hang Thun Hak, was made Prime Minister in his place, but was to be forced out in early 1973 after a period of increasingly poor outcomes for the Republic in the Cambodian Civil War.