Even a few pro-government voters hailed Sunday’s general election, if only in hopes that a new government would bring improvement to their lives in one of the world’s most impoverished nations.
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It has been a gruelling race between the National League for Democracy (NLD) and the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), at one point resulting in an armed attack on various NLD candidates.
Before the vote, the election commission acknowledged that errors on the registration lists were widespread, and it could only guarantee that the lists were 30 percent accurate. “I love her. She will change our country in a very good way”, said Massachusetts Khine, a street food vendor.
He added that, “it’s not free of flaws or shortcomings, but we did not expect that”. “Already, it looks like we are ahead of the other parties”, he said, setting off another round of cheers.
Tin Aye, center, chairman of Union Election Commission (UEC) inspects a polling station in Naypyitaw, Myanmar, Saturday, November 7, 2015. We’re excited to see the energy of the Burmese people. “It’s clearly been an important day for them”.
A plainclothes man identifying himself as an officer in the special branch security intelligence arm of the police accompanied CNN during its tour of the polling station.
The BBC’s Jonah Fisher in Yangon says that while this is a very big ask, it is by no means impossible if the party, which is popular in urban areas, manages to win seats in rural areas which tend to be dominated by ethnic minorities.
Despite this, she has insisted she will lead the country and be “above the president” if the NLD takes power.
A Muslim Myanmar voter poses with her inked finger after she cast her vote at a polling station in Yangon. She then walked away without stopping to talk to journalists.
The two main candidates contesting in Sunday’s vote are her party’s Tun Myint and the ruling Union Solidarity Development Party’s Ye Aung.
After taking power in 1962, the junta first allowed elections in 1990, which Suu Kyi’s party won overwhelmingly.
But Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) is widely expected to make sweeping gains, ending decades of military control. Suu Kyi’s late husband and sons are British. There remain important structural and systemic impediments to the realization of full democratic and civilian government, including the reservation of a large number of unelected seats for the military; the disfranchisement of groups of people who voted in previous elections, including the Rohingya; and the disqualification of candidates based on arbitrary application of citizenship and residency requirements.
The opposition National League of Democracy has won about 70 percent of votes counted so far as of midday Monday, party spokesman Win Htein said. Suu Kyi, who is NLD chairperson and a parliamentarian, won in the general election securing a seat with the House of Representative in the next parliament. She spent most of the next 20 years under house arrest before her release in 2010.
The USDP won by default and took office in 2011 under President Thein Sein, a former general who began political and economic reforms to end Myanmar’s isolation and jump-start its moribund economy.
Hundreds of voters have lined up in a cramped school corridor where opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi will cast her ballot later Sunday. It was the first time even for Suu Kyi, the epitome of the democracy movement who had defied the junta for decades.
“There are more people this time compared to 2010”, said Daw Thein Thein Tun, the election official at the facility.
“I couldn’t sleep all night”, said Yangon resident Massachusetts Khaing Myo Twin, 42.
Su Hnin Kyu, 20, came to vote with her parents and two older brothers, and the family reveled in the holiday-like atmosphere.
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The former head of Myanmar’s ruling party has conceded defeat in his constituency in the country’s election, becoming the first prominent casualty to Aung San Suu Kyi’s opposition party.
