With the full tally of votes still being counted, the electoral commission announced on Friday that the National League for Democracy (NLD) had already won more than the 329-seats needed for a majority in Burma’s two-house parliament.
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Aung San Suu Kyi invited the army chief, president and the parliamentary speaker to discuss the election and has said she will form a national reconciliation government.
But the victory is a sweet second chance for the party, which also won a landslide victory in the first election it contested in 1990, only to see the results annulled by the military, and many of its leading members harassed and jailed.
In seven constituencies, elections were not held meaning a simple majority could be reached at 329 seats.
Suu Kyi is barred from becoming president by the junta-drafted constitution because her children are foreign nationals. Suu Kyi was under house arrest at the time and had to accept the Nobel Peace Prize the following year in absentia.
Coming to her personal biography Aung San Suu Kyi was born on 19th June 1945, at Yangon, Burma.
Suu Kyi has declared, however, that she will become the country’s de facto leader, acting “above the president” if her party forms the next government, and that the new president will be a figurehead.
Suu Kyi’s father, Aung San, negotiated the country’s independence from the British empire in 1947 and was assassinated by his rivals. “As the government, we will respect and obey the election results and transfer power peacefully”.
Suu Kyi, who spent most of her youth overseas studying in India and later at Oxford, returned to Yangon in 1988 as mass pro-democracy demonstrations were rocking the city. Ne Win instituted a new constitution in 1974 based on an isolationist policy with a socialist economic program that nationalised Burma’s major enterprises. “Nowhere else in the world is there such a gap between the end of the election and the forming of the new administration, and certainly it’s something about which we should all be concerned”, Suu Kyi told reporters last week at her lakeside residence in Rangoon.
Mahn Johnny, a Catholic member of the National League for Democracy, said his party’s landslide victory, including in many ethnic areas, showed that the country demanded change after more than five decades of rule by a harsh military regime.
She has made several high-profile foreign visits, but has also come under criticism for failing to take a strong stance on issues including the treatment of Myanmar’s Rohingya minority.
In a call with Ms Suu Kyi, Mr Obama “commended her for her tireless efforts and sacrifice over so many years to promote a more inclusive, peaceful and democratic Burma”, the White House said.
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It gave way to Mr Sein’s nominally civilian elected government in 2011 but with strings attached, including installing retired senior officers in the ruling party to fill cabinet posts. And in a state of emergency, it allows a special military-led body to assume sweeping state powers.
