Myanmar votes in landmark election

Myanmar’s President Thein Sein, right, waves after casting his vote in Naypyitaw, Myanmar, Sunday, November 8, 2015.

Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi arrives at a polling station to cast her vote during Burma’s election.

Around the country, voters lined up before the polls opened at 6 a.m. and waited in the hot sun for hours to cast their ballot. “I voted for change”.

So far so good, I must say. In its initial report, it said that the people it had talked to had said that it was their intention to vote Suu Kyi’s NLD.

“My whole family is excited”.

That may not be farfetched, given Suu Kyi’s popularity.

For all of the many issues though, this was the first comparatively free general election in this country for a quarter of a century, and for many people, their first-ever vote.

Ms Suu Kyi has also faced global censure for failing to speak up for the country’s embattled Muslim population, especially the ethnic Rohingya in restive Rakhine state.

Observers predicted a high turnout in Myanmar’s freest general election for decades as polls closed Sunday afternoon. To counter that scenario, the NLD would require a huge win.

“It’s my first time voting”. You don’t even have to ask me who I voted for.

“But unless the NLD wins more than 66.5 per cent of seats in the lower and upper house combined, it can not set up a government alone”, he said.

The one thing almost all of them have in common is that they have never before had the opportunity to elect a new government.

Myanmar’s president has vowed to cooperate with opposition parties for a stable transition should the election knock him out of power. That vote won’t be held before February.

Ms Suu Kyi, a former Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is barred from the presidency as the constitution disqualifies anyone with foreign offspring.

Equally the USDP could also look to build alliances with ethnic groups.

He was released in 2012 as part of a mass presidential pardon that came with an opening of the country after the military transferred power to a quasi-civilian government in 2011.

Britain’s ambassador to Myanmar, Julian Braithwaite, said “a vote that is credible, inclusive and transparent and which represents the will of the people would stand as a lasting legacy” for the current government.

“The work by the USDP has not been bad in the last five years”, he said, speaking on the sole crackly phone line into the ridge-top community, which lies a full day’s drive by vehicle from the nearest market town.

Thousands are missing from voter lists, millions overseas failed to register in time, and most of the 1.1 million persecuted Muslim Rohingya minority are barred from voting.

Many of them came from Bangladesh generations ago, but Myanmar’s government continues to treat them as foreigners, and does not officially recognise them. Their influence can be gauged from the fact that even Suu Kyi has not fielded a single Muslim candidate, not to antagonise Massachusetts Ba Tha.

Security had been a concern in the lead-up to the vote but the secretary of the district election commission, U Kyaw Swar Oo, told The Myanmar Times that all 53 polling stations in the district opened on time this morning.

“If it’s not clean we will be sad”, he said.

The elections are also seen as a chance for Suu Kyi to reclaim what she sees as her destiny.

Onn Than, an election commissioner at Hlaing Ther Yar township, outside Yangon, said he was instructed by the Union Election Commission in Nay Pyi Taw to conduct the poll transparently. A shocked army refused to seat the winning lawmakers, with the excuse that a new constitution first had to be implemented – a task that ended up taking 18 years and intense global pressure.

The NLD’s landslide victory the following year was dismissed by a junta, which immediately jailed many of Suu Kyi’s allies and kept her confined to her lakeside Yangon home for much of the next two decades.

The coming days of counting and verifying ballots will provide a pivotal test of pledges by Myanmar’s military-backed president Thein Sein to respect the results of an election expected to show strong support for Ms. Suu Kyi. But if they can get absolute majority of elected seats-we must remember that 25 percent of seats are still reserved for the military-remains to be seen. But the military will still control 25 percent of the seats in parliament and key ministries.

“I think the country will be better if the party we chose or the leader we chose actually becomes the leader”. I’m voting for NLD.