Early Election Results Suggest Landslide Victory For Myanmar Opposition
By Joshua Lipes
2015-11-09
Supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi celebrate as they look at official election results outside the National League of Democracy headquarters in Yangon, Nov. 9, 2015. - AFP
Early results from Myanmar’s historic general elections over the weekend suggest an overwhelming win for Aung San Suu Kyi’s opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) party, prompting officials from the country’s ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) to concede defeat Monday.
According to official results from Myanmar’s Union Election Commission (UEC), the NLD has won 49 of first 54 seats announced for parliament’s lower house, where 330 of 440 seats were up for grabs in Sunday’s polls—the first deemed free in the country in a quarter of a century.
The USDP won three of the seats, while the ethnic Wa Democratic Party won one and the ethnic Kachin Democratic Party won another.
While many results have yet to trickle in—particularly from the country’s remote border regions—USDP party chair Htay Oo acknowledged defeat Monday.
“In the first free and fair election in 25 years, in the November 8 election I have to confess that the USDP has lost to the NLD. We will accept this result,” he said, according to media reports.
An unofficial count from the NLD suggested the opposition would capture 70 percent of contested seats in parliament—more than the two-thirds it needs to form a government. Under the constitution, drafted by the former junta regime in 2008, 25 percent of seats are reserved for military appointees.
“They must accept the results, even though they don't want to,” NLD spokesman Win Htein told Reuters news agency, adding that in central Myanmar, the opposition was poised to take more than 90 percent of seats.
Results have been counted in four regions as of Monday, with a further 10 yet to be announced. A final count may take several days or even weeks.
If the early results hold true for the rest of the country, the NLD will form Myanmar’s first democratically-elected government since the early 1960s.
President Thein Sein’s quasi-civilian government ended five decades of military rule in the country in 2011 when it took power following general elections a year earlier that the NLD boycotted amid concerns they were neither free nor fair.
The NLD had swept the previous election in 1990, but the then-ruling junta ignored the results and placed Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for more than a decade.
The USDP campaigned on a platform of demonstrated reform, which it has ushered in since assuming control of the country, but remains closely aligned with the military. Htay Oo had predicted that the USDP would win as much as 80 percent of the vote as recently as Friday, despite widespread expectations of an NLD victory.
Smooth balloting
Sunday’s vote passed without major incident and was widely praised by international observers. Some estimates put the turnout at around 80 percent of eligible voters.
The U.S. State Department also commended Myanmar on its polls, which Secretary of State John Kerry called “peaceful and historic,” and “one step closer to [building] a democracy that respects the rights of all” in a statement released Sunday.
But he acknowledged that the vote was “far from perfect” and noted remaining “structural and systemic impediments” to the realization of a full democratic and civilian government in Myanmar, including the reservation of parliamentary seats for the military, voter disenfranchisement of ethnic groups such as the Rohingya Muslims, and the disqualification of candidates based on citizenship requirements.
Kerry said that a peaceful post-election period is crucial for stability and maintaining confidence in the electoral process, and pledged U.S. support for the people of Myanmar in their pursuit of democracy going forward.
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