NLD earned 291 seats in the three levels of the parliament, these includes the 78 seats in the House of Representatives, 29 seats in the House of Nationalities and 19 seats in the Region or State Parliament.
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The ruling Union Solidarity Development Party, which is backed by the military, has won just 5% of the votes counted.
To form Myanmar’s first democratically elected government since the early 1960s, the NLD needs to win more than two-thirds of seats that were contested and, with 7 seats in the lower house not contested because of fighting in a few areas, it is now only 2 seats off this target. On a daily basis, the outcome will continue to be released by the UEC.
Twenty-five years after winning a landslide election that was ignored by the military junta, Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) is inching closer to repeating their victory.
“He welcomed the successful conduct of the campaign and of the elections and congratulated Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi for her decisive role in the progress of democracy in Myanmar, which must be pursued”, said a statement from the mission.
She and Thein Sein, the president of the country formerly known as Burma, reportedly have agreed to meet soon about the transition.
The military-drafted Constitution doesn’t allow for anyone who has children that are foreign nationals to become president. While she was believed to have won the election, the military rulers put her under arrest and annulled the results.
Attention was riveted Thursday to what has been called “the magic number” for Suu Kyi’s party.
Under Myanmar’s complex parliamentary-president system, the military and the largest parties in both the lower and upper houses of parliament will nominate a president.
It installed retired senior officers in the ruling party to fill Cabinet posts and gave itself key powers in the constitution, including control of powerful ministries and a quarter of the seats in the 664-member two-chamber Parliament.
The supporters wore shirts with Suu Kyi’s face printed on them and waved NLD’s official flag with an emblem of a golden peacock.
The Carter Centre, a team of election observers led by former USA president Jimmy Carter’s grandson, said it found the voting and counting process to be generally well conducted but noted problems including voting bans on members of the country’s minority Rohingya community and inconsistencies in making preliminary results available at constituency level.
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“After all the election tasks of Union Election Commission will be completed, we [both sides] will arrange for the talks [offered by the opposition leader]”, he said.
