Myanmar proposes delaying November. 8 elections due to flooding

Myanmar’s 2015 general election will be held as scheduled on November 8, the country’s Union Election Commission said on Wednesday.

Union Election Commission Chairman Tin Aye had proposed in a meeting with political parties earlier Tuesday that the parliamentary election be postponed either nationwide or in a few areas hit by monsoon rains.

The opposition National League for Democracy party led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi said it was against a delay.

The NLD is also expected to win this year’s election.

Myanmar’s Union Election Commission on Tuesday decided that elections would not be held in a few sensitive areas deemed as being impossible to do so in a free and fair manner. In 1990, a military government annulled an election victory by the NLD and put the party’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, now 70, under house arrest.

Yan Myo Thein, a political analyst, said the proposal showed that the election commission and Thein Sein were “not honest and trustworthy in politics”.

Government officials cited recent flooding and and civil unrest as the reasons for proposing the delay after summoning party representatives to a meeting in the capital Naypidaw on Tuesday.

Former political prisoner Nay Phone Latt, a candidate for Yangon’s regional parliament, told the NAR: “We got a good reaction, in spite of the weather”.

During July and August, floods in Myanmar killed 121 people and caused more than 1.6 million to flee their homes, according to the United Nations.

“This is a false excuse, the disasters in Chin and flooding are quite negotiable”, said Win Htein.

Mr Thein Sein, a former general, has been widely praised for overseeing a democratic transition after the military ceded power to a quasi-civilian government in 2011.

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But tensions have been running high ahead of the poll, largely stoked by the Massachusetts Ba Tha, an organisation led by the hardline nationalist monks that has sharply criticised the NLD.

Election monitors declined to comment on the situation until a final decision is reached by the election commission.