Myanmar election: Aung San Suu Kyi's party on track for majority

Former political prisoner says ‘times are different, people are different’, after poll described by EU observers as well-run

Fresh results from Myanmar’s election on Tuesday showed Aung San Suu Kyi’s opposition party winning dozens more seats in parliament as observers declared the poll “credible and transparent”.

The National League for Democracy (NLD) said its own tally of results posted at polling stations around the country showed it was on track to take more than the two-thirds of seats in the lower house of parliament needed to form Myanmar’s first democratically elected government since the early 1960s.

In her first post-election interview, Aung San Suu Kyi told the BBC that her party had won 75% of contested seats. She said the elections were not fair, but had been “largely free”.

“The times are different, the people are different,” she said. “I find the people are far more politicised now than they were back, not just in 1990, but much more politicised than they were in 2012, when we campaigned for the byelection, and very much more alert to what it going on around them.”

She also said the “communications revolution” had made a difference to the electorate, in part because “it’s much more difficult for those who wish to engage in irregularities to get away with it”.

Results dribbling out of the election commission so far confirm that the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) is being widely beaten.

By noon on Tuesday, of the 88 declared seats in the lower house, the NLD had taken 78 with the USDP winning just five.

There are 440 seats in the lower house but, under the constitution drawn up by the former junta, a quarter of these are unelected and reserved for the military.

A senior USDP member and retired army officer Kyi Win reportedly conceded that the party had lost to the NLD.

“Our USDP lost completely. The NLD has won. This is the fate of our country. Let them [the NLD] work. Aung San Suu Kyi has to take responsibility now … we congratulate them anyway,” he told news agency AFP from party headquarters in the capital Naypyidaw.

But the NLD accused the election commission of intentionally delaying results, saying it wanted

“The election commission has been delaying intentionally because maybe they want to play a trick or something,” NLD spokesman Win Htien told reporters at Aung San Suu Kyi’s house after a party meeting.

“It doesn’t make sense that they are releasing the results piece by piece. It shouldn’t be like that,” he said. “They are trying to be crooked.”

Meanwhile the European Union mission observing the elections said that the polls were well-run, with monitoring teams around the country reporting an overwhelmingly positive message about the conduct of the contest.

“On election day, EU observers reported that the voters of Myanmar turned out in large numbers and calmly cast their votes in a generally, well-run process,” chief observer Alexander Graf Lambsdorff told reporters in Yangon.

“The process went better than many expected beforehand,” he said, and dozens of international observers around the country “reported very positively on the voting ... with 95% rating the process a ‘good’ or ‘very good’.”

He said observers in military installations had no problems monitoring polls, a widely held concern ahead of the elections.

“I want to say very clearly, this election is not over yet. As long as
counting is going on and until final results are announced, this
election is still ongoing,” he said.

But for some the election was over.

“The difference between the parties is huge. It’s a clear win,” said Sitida, a 37-year-old Buddhist monk in the central city of Mandalay who marched in the country’s 2007 “Saffron revolution” protests that were bloodily crushed by the junta.

Sitida, who was sentenced to 70 years in prison for his role in the demonstrations but was given amnesty as part of political reforms in 2011, said the military would now have to accept the NLD’s win and negotiate an orderly retreat from politics.

Daw Suu can make this happen. Daw Suu can convince them,” he said, referring to Aung San Suu Kyi with an honorific.

However, while the USDP has been diminished and much of the establishment shaken by the extent of Aung San Suu Kyi’s victory, the army remains a formidable power.

In addition to its guaranteed bloc of parliamentary seats, the commander-in-chief nominates the heads of three powerful and big-budget ministries – interior, defence and border security – and the constitution also gives him the right to take over the government under certain circumstances.

Although the military has said it will accept the outcome of the election, analysts say a period of uncertainty still looms for the former Burma because it is not clear how Aung San Suu Kyi will share power easily with the generals.

Sunday’s vote was Myanmar’s first general election since its long-ruling military ceded power to president Thein Sein’s quasi-civilian government in 2011, ushering in a period of reform and opening up to foreign investment.

It was also a moment for Aung San Suu Kyi to relish after spending years under house arrest following the election in 1990 when her NLD won a landslide victory that was ignored by the junta.

Aung San Suu Kyi is barred by the constitution from taking the presidency herself, though has said she will be the real power behind the new president, regardless of a charter she has derided as “very silly”

The US government on Monday welcomed the election as a victory for Myanmar’s people but said it would watch for the democratic process to move forward before making any adjustments to sanctions on a country long considered a pariah.

President Barack Obama has invested significant personal effort in Myanmar, visiting the countrytwice in the past three years, hoping to make its democratic transition a legacy of his presidency and an element of his strategic “pivot” to Asia.

Daniel Russel, the US assistant secretary of state for east Asia, said that after 50 years of military dictatorship, “this was a hell of a step forward for the democratic process in Burma” but added: “Now comes the hard part.”

For the US and the international community to provide the kind of support Myanmar needed, Russel said, the transition from the current government to the future administration “is going to have to be credible”.