Opposition in Myanmar expected to win biggest share of votes

The Union Election Commission stated overnight that voter turnout was 80 percent.

In a speech Monday at the NLD headquarters, Suu Kyi said: “It is still a bit early to congratulate our candidates who will be the winners”. At 8:30, she could be seen standing ramrod straight in line, clutching her purse and smart phone, anxious to cast her ballot.

The head of the European Union’s election monitoring team, Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, offered cautious optimism.

The election is seen as the first real chance for democracy to take root in Myanmar.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Myanmar are disenfranchised, including Rohingya Muslims in the west of the country who are denied citizenship and residents of conflict zones where voting was canceled by the election commission. “I’m voting for NLD. She must win”, said Thet Paing Oo, a 24-year-old fruit seller, referring to the leader with an affectionate term that many people here use. “I expect change”, he told VOA.

“However, we do accept the results without any reservations”.

“I think Mother Suu will win”.

Voter’s fingers were stained to prevent fraudulent voting.

While initial results suggested Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party was leading in Yangon, Mandalay and Naypyidaw, final results won’t be known for days, and crucial votes from the countryside may be longer in coming.

Across the country queues of people, many wearing traditional longyi sarongs, snaked outside polling stations. The village is effectively an island, sitting on a horseshoe of the Yangon River.

At a monastery that served as a polling station, voters, journalists and election workers were barefoot as part of Buddhist tradition.

The mood was less festive at a military hospital in Yangon that serves as a polling station for around 1,200 military doctors, nurses and relatives of hospital staff.

Although more than 90 parties are contesting the elections, the main fight is between Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy and the ruling Union Solidarity Development Party, made up largely of former junta members.

But Suu Kyi has been here before and knows well that an election victory does not guarantee power in Myanmar.

Richard Horsey, a Myanmar analyst, said that given the powers it has, the military will not be too perturbed about allowing a transfer of power to the NLD if it wins.

If she wins a majority and is able to form Myanmar’s first democratically elected government since the early 1960s, Ms. Suu Kyi says she will be the power behind the new president regardless of a constitution she has derided as “very silly”.

M: The United States welcomes the election, but describes the polls as “far from perfect”.

Abdul Melik, a 29-year-old Rohingya, spent election day watching other people vote.

At the U.S. State Department, spokesman John Kirby has said key USA officials are closely watching the elections as an index of Myanmar’s progress from military dictatorship to democracy.

Even if Suu Kyi’s party secures the highest number of seats in the bicameral legislature, it will start with a disadvantage because of the reserved places for the military in the 664-seat parliament.

Suu Kyi, 70, and her party are the longtime foils to the generals who ruled Myanmar from a coup in 1962 until 2011, when they handed power to their political arm after a vote tainted by allegations of fraud and boycotted by the opposition. Suu Kyi was married to a British citizen, and her two children have foreign nationality. Her two sons, with her late husband, are British.

The daughter of independence hero General Aung San, Suu Kyi, 70, has headed non-violent opposition to the country’s military rulers in a three decade role that has come at great personal cost. She married a foreigner. “I think everything is going to change”, said Yee Yee, 30, a market spice seller.

Burmese opposition politician Aung San Suu Kyi arrives to cast her vote. But she said last week that if her party won, she would run the government and be “above the president”. She did not explain her remarks. “It’s clearly been an important day for them”.

Almost 7,000 candidates from 91 parties are running for posts in both houses of parliament. The government considers them foreigners even though many have lived in Myanmar for generations.