Aung San Suu Kyi’s Opposition NLD Party Wins Historic Myanmar Elections

Myanmar’s election commission said on Friday that the party of the Nobel Peace laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi had won 348 seats in Parliament, giving her democracy movement a majority and the power to select the country’s next president.

Congress President Sonia Gandhi today congratulated Myanmar’s pro-democracy crusader Aung San Suu Kyi for her party’s landslide victory in the historic parliamentary polls there. Frequently under house arrest several times, her Nobel Prize was awarded in absentia.

On Tuesday morning, following enormous rallies on the two preceding days, she told a crowd of supporters not to provoke the losers: “I want to remind you all that even candidates who didn’t win have to accept the winners but it is important not to provoke the candidates who didn’t win to make them feel bad”.

Suu Kyi’s party said it received a message Wednesday from Information Minister Ye Htut on behalf of Thein Sein congratulating it for leading the race for parliamentary seats. Suu Kyi herself is barred from becoming president under a 2008 constitution drafted by the military because her children are foreign nationals. However she made clear she will run the government – which she says will promote “national reconciliation”.

With votes still being counted, the Union Election Commission said the National League for Democracy (NLD) party had crossed the 329 threshold of seats needed for an outright majority in both houses of the 664-member parliament.

More than half a century later, the dominant military and its political proxies have admitted defeat, issuing strikingly magnanimous congratulations to the NLD for its election performance. She formed the NLD party in September of that year and was first placed under house arrest in 1989.

“She never for one moment forgot that she was the daughter of Burma’s national hero, Aung San”, wrote Michael Aris, her scholar husband, in the foreword Suu Kyi’s book Freedom From Fear, in 1991.

Nyan Win said the NLD would use the meeting to get a better sense of “how to build a new government”, adding that the party also plans to tap “intellectuals” to lead its ministries and will begin to hammer out “laws to develop the country” after forming its administration.

Despite this, the election was seen as the first openly contested poll in Myanmar – also known as Burma – in 25 years.

Myanmar’s military has pledged to respect the results of the election.

Meanwhile, the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) has booked 104 seats, including 28 in the House of Representatives, 12 in the House of Nationalities, and 62 in the Region or State Parliament. They contained more than one million Muslims, including ethnic groups living in northern edge areas where militias have been combating with the army, and ethnic Rohingya who were stripped of their citizenship. Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch went as far as to tweet ahead of the election “if only she were as principled as popular”.

Tu Ja said Suu Kyi should be careful to ensure the voices of ethnic minorities are heard in the new government – and not just the views of Myanmar’s ethnic Bamar majority.

Hence, to realise her long cherished dream of bringing democracy to Myanmar, Suu Kyi has been crusading for free and fair elections.