Aung San Suu Kyi’s party claims victory in Myanmar’s election
Its main opponent, an army-backed party, refuses to concede defeatSU PON CHIT had to contain her excitement. It was November 8th, the day of Myanmar’s second election since the end of military rule in 2015. A poll observer, she was duty-bound to be impartial. But she is also an ardent supporter of Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto leader, and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD). She watched as voters queued and ballots were counted in her neighbourhood in Yangon, the commercial capital. The NLD’s tally, scrawled on a blackboard, soared past its opponents’. Exhausted but jubilant, Ms Su Pon Chit went home to write her report. Hundreds of NLD supporters, sharing her confidence, flocked to party headquarters to celebrate.The Union Election Commission, which organised the poll, has released just under half the results so far but Monywa Aung Shin, the NLD’s spokesperson, says it has won 399 of the 476 elected seats in the two chambers of the legislature. That is enough to form a government and name the president, and nine more than the NLD won in its landslide victory five years ago. Once again the NLD appears to have trounced its biggest opponent, the army-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), and it has beaten expectations in states dominated by ethnic minorities.The USDP, however, claims that the poll was unfair. The election commission is an easy target. It is appointed by the president, an NLD stalwart. It did not publish the final number of registered voters until after voting started. It disqualified candidates well into the campaign. Citing security worries, it did not hold elections in several states, disenfranchising 1.5m voters, mainly from ethnic minorities. Yet on the day itself, the Carter Centre, an NGO that monitored the election, found “no major irregularities”.Nevertheless, the scale of the NLD’s victory is surprising. Its record in office has been lacklustre. Economic growth has been disappointing. Efforts to end the civil wars simmering in the country’s periphery are flagging. Discontent with the NLD has been mounting, especially among ethnic minorities.After their poor performance in the previous election in 2015, many parties championing ethnic minorities merged, in order not to split the opposition vote. The number of covid-19 cases sharply increased in September, just as campaigning began, stirring fears about turnout.But “Mother Suu” remains hugely popular in Myanmar, especially among the ethnic-Bamar majority, but also with some minorities. Win Lae Shwe Yee, an ethnic Shan, voted for the NLD in this election and in 2015. She vehemently disagrees with those who have come to see the NLD as a party of the Bamar, rather than all Burmese, saying Ms Suu Kyi works “tirelessly” for the whole country. It helps that the NLD tends to field candidates from the dominant ethnicity in each constituency. Moreover, it controls government budgets, notes Salai Jimmy Rezar Boi, secretary of the Chin National League for Democracy (CNLD), an ethnically based party. He says that in Chin state, the NLD, having promised to build schools, bridges and the like, took 35 out of 39 seats in the state parliament, up from 28 in 2015. The CNLD won just one.The army may have given the NLD an unintentional fillip just days before the election, when Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief, impugned the integrity of the election and accused the government of making “unacceptable mistakes”, prompting fears that the top brass might repudiate the election result (it is anyway guaranteed 25% of the seats in parliament, enough to block constitutional reform). The general, perhaps realising his mistake, later said he would accept the outcome. But Moe Thuzar of the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a think-tank in Singapore, suspects that his intervention helped to turn out the vote. On November 11th the USDP demanded that the election commission “hold a new election again, co-operating with the military”. That will only strengthen Mother Suu’s appeal. Reuse this contentThe Trust Project