The result officially ends decades of military rule.
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“I don’t think the military want to stay in the driver’s seat”. However, the military added a provision to the country’s 2008 Constitution created to bar her from the country’s highest office, preventing anyone with foreign family members from being president.
Meanwhile, leaders of the current government, military and the ruling party have all openly voiced acceptance of the decision of the voters, promising to transfer power within the set time-frame and cooperate for a peaceful and stable transition.
Aung Ko Ko, who now runs an organization promoting interfaith harmony, said a key test of whether the NLD can offer the Rohingya any hope depends on whether or not they try to revise the citizenship law.
In 1990, the military government did not accept the result of a general election in which the NLD recorded a comprehensive victory, and refused to hand over power. Elections weren’t held in seven constituencies, which means a effortless majority might be reached at 329 seats.
The southeast Asian nation was ruled for five decades by a brutal junta that smothered opponents with violence and jail.
Ms Suu Kyi can not become President because the constitution specifically bars anyone whose children were born foreign nationals from holding the job as both her sons were born British.
Days of painstakingly slow vote counting on Friday finally gave Ms Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy more than half the seats in the country’s 329 seat parliament, allowing the 70-year-old Nobel Peace Prize victor to nominate a president and form a government. The two forms of legislatures combined have 882 seats.
In a surprise move after mass protests in 1988 against their economically disastrous regime, the military called multi-party general elections.
The two talked about the importance of all parties respecting the election results once announced in Myanmar, also known as Burma.
“Since this remark is usually made with a sympathetic and often admiring smile, we do not take offence”, Suu Kyi said about the cowshed reference.
The doctor, author and human rights champion was handed a 20-year sentence by a martial court in 1993.
With the victory, National League will gain control over the executive posts under Burma’s parliamentary-presidency system.
Though she began her career as an Oxford-educated academic, she had politics in her blood.
He famously used prison uniforms as canvasses for smuggled-in paint during his incarceration at Yangon’s sprawling Insein Prison, artworks that have become an iconic symbol of Myanmar’s tortured past.
Election observers have praised Myanmar’s handling of Sunday’s polls, which were deemed mostly free and fair, although large numbers of ethnic and religious minorities were not allowed to vote.
Suu Kyi, the daughter of an independence leader, expressed concern last week about irregularities in advance voting, fraud and intimidation. So far 80 percent of seats have been declared but the NLD already holds 19 more than it needed to win.
Myanmar’s reform drive since 2011 has brought new freedoms to the nation’s long-suffering people – including a general easing of censorship and the release of many political prisoners.
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“It is not just the government’s responsibility it is everyone’s responsibility … to be part of the change they are longing to see from cleaner streets (don’t spit, drop rubbish) to healing and reconciliation between the many tribal groups”.
