Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD has taken a total of 759 seats at the three levels of the parliament after Sunday’s historic election.
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“We have high expectations that the NLD-led government will listen to ethnic voices”, said Gint Kam Lian, who won an upper house seat – one of four national parliament and two state parliament seats the party claimed.
Reports emerged Thursday that the NLD received an overwhelming electoral majority, taking 90 percent of parliamentary seats with 47 percent declared.
It is 55 years since Burma’s last democratically elected leader, the revered prime minister U Nu, won power at the ballot box. With 332 seats won as at 1.30pm Singapore time, however, the NLD has secured a majority of the seats in the national parliament.
Friday’s results come on the fifth anniversary of Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest after 21 years of imprisonment.
The party says it has guided the country through the major economic and social reforms that led to Sunday’s election, which saw 80 per cent voter turnout.
It promises a new dawn for a country asphyxiated by half a century of army rule that battered the economy and repressed its people. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) has swept elections as per as incoming results from the polls.
A clause inserted by the military before it transferred power to Thein Sein’s quasi-civilian government in 2011 bars citizens with foreign spouses from holing the office. That decision meant not seeing her husband before his death from cancer in 1999, and missing her two sons growing up.
Suu Kyi, 70, is barred from the presidency by a junta-scripted constitution, which also guarantees the army a 25-percent bloc of seats.
Aside from the 25% of seats ringfenced for the military, there were 168 contested seats in the upper house of parliament and 330 in the lower house, although seven of those lower house seats were cancelled due to fighting with insurgent groups in border areas.
Suu Kyi’s party now seems set to get absolute majority in the lower house of Myanmar’s parliament and well ahead in the lower house as well as regional and state legislatures.
Government beckons for Suu Kyi’s party in a seismic change of the political landscape in a country controlled for five decades by the military.
In an interview with Channel NewsAsia, Aung San Suu Kyi said that she will be the one directing the president if she wins the election.
Their conciliatory messages appeared to end lingering fears that the military might overturn the result, as it did when the NLD won a previous election by a landslide in 1990.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who spent years under house arrest, has said that a triumph for the NLD would place her “above the president”.
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Party executives have been sorting out transition plans, making arrangements to meet soon with President Thein Sein, House Speaker Shwe Mann, and the real power behind the government, army commander Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing.
