Myanmar’s president has assured the natio…
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Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) won Sunday’s election, the co-chairman of the military-backed ruling party announced, potentially paving the way for the country’s first popularly-elected government in half a century.
“We’ll win tonight, we’ll stay until we win anyway”, said 24-year-old Wanna Htay, sporting a scarlet bandana with the party’s iconic fighting peacock motif as the crowd sung and cheered around him. The trend was expected to continue in Myanmar’s remaining 10 states.
The USA officials said the president and military leadership of Myanmar, which is also known as Burma, had publicly reaffirmed that they would accept the election results. And the opposition is conceding defeat.
According to incomplete counting of votes reported by local media, NLD is leading as victor of the election.
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.
Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel peace laureate leader of the NLD who spent 15 years under house arrest for opposing the former junta, urged supporters at party headquarters Monday not to “provoke” candidates who have lost.
In early results from Sunday’s vote – billed as the country’s freest in a generation – Suu Kyi’s opposition National League for Democracy won 25 of 28 seats in the lower house of parliament, the election commission said.
“We will win a landslide”, Nyan Win told The Associated Press.
The Election Commission has not officially confirmed the result.
“I want Mother Suu to win in this election”, said street trader Massachusetts Khine.
But a legacy of rule by military junta means Ms Suu Kyi, who led the campaign for democracy, can not become president herself. “I think that the key thing now is to get through the next several weeks which will be a complicated and delicate and important time”, Russel said.
In an official complaint, it said it was “illogical” the USDP could win 90% of advance votes – made by those unable to vote on election day – in Lashio, a township in the east of the country with a large military presence. A two-thirds majority would give it control over the executive posts under Myanmar’s complicated parliamentary-presidency system, which reserves a quarter of the 664 seats for the military. Excluded from casting their ballot were around a million Rohingya muslims.
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The military-drafted constitution guarantees one-quarter of parliament’s seats to unelected members of the armed forces and allows the commander-in-chief to nominate the head of three powerful ministries, interior, defence and border security. The 2015 general elections are the second in Myanmar after the previous military government handed over state power to a civilian government in 2011 through the first elections held in 2010. ETHNIC SHAN PARTIES Perhaps the most influential of various ethnic minority parties, Shan parties are pushing for amendment of the constitution and more autonomy for their state.
