At a press conference on Thursday, Suu Kyi repeated her stance that she would “be above the president” leading the country.
Advertisement
Myanmar’s ruling party has said the Constitution does not allow anyone to be above the President, in response to a remark by opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi that she would be “above the President” if her party wins the election this weekend.
Suu Kyi has been coy about who the NLD would put forward if they were to gain enough votes to choose the president.
The election rally for Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy this week was a colorful, maddening array: three-wheeled rickshaws clogged the roads, blasting music and displaying the red colors and posters of their national heroine. But the military annulled the results and locked Suu Kyi up. She has unequivocally expressed her desire to lead the government despite knowing she is constitutionally barred from becoming the country’s president.
The ballot is considered a key test of an ongoing process of democratic reform and could herald the former pariah state’s first popularly-elected government since a military coup in 1962.
It’s a ploy, a few think, to fool illiterate or rushed voters to accidentally pick another party instead of Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy. The remaining 110 seats, or 25 percent of the house, will be military personnel appointed by the commander-in-chief.
If that nominee wins the combined parliamentary vote, which must take place within 90 days of the election, he or she would be answerable to her alone, she said. The military has a crucial role to play: opening up the process, working with the new government in recreating a space for all, including the non-signatories of the October 15 pact, and working together in molding the complexities into a simple federalist democracy, all within a reasonable timeframe. Prior to her first stint of house arrest in July 1989, Suu Kyi spent months on a tiring and often personally unsafe campaign trail. That requirement, clearly aimed at Suu Kyi, effectively bans her from the presidency, since her late husband was British, as are her two sons.
More than 30 million people are eligible to vote in Myanmar’s election on Sunday, a poll that could redraw the political landscape of a nation smothered by decades of junta rule. At the same time, she said, they may be overly optimistic that they are on the cusp of real democracy.
“I believe Mother Suu is the one to change the country, because she loves [Burmese] people”, says Rangoon resident Zao Zarr.
In an election with 91 parties competing, including across restive ethnic areas, its victory is far from assured and the NLD has been burned before by army dirty tricks.
“I’ll be above the president”, she told the hundreds of reporters gathered at the lakeside villa that was her prison before the country began its transition from dictatorship to democracy five years ago.
Suu Kyi will still probably need Shwe Mann, because this election is not going to be like the last free election in 1990, when the NLD swept the board.
On the trip home from Indonesia, Clinton aides presented her with a copy of a documentary about Suu Kyi called “The Lady”.
But with 11,000 local and worldwide monitors overseeing 40,000 polling stations, election observers said they are hopeful that any attempts at systematic wrongdoing will be spotted. As the country also known as Burma prepares for its most competitive election in a generation, there’s little talk in Congress about removing sanctions.
Megawati became the symbol of people’s resistance against Soeharto, who along with the military ruled Indonesia for about 32 years until his fall in May 1998.
Myanmar’s 2008 Constitution is glaringly silent on the civilian supremacy over the military, which is among the principal feature of democratic governments worldwide.
Myanmar is a country with a long and proud history of nationhood.
When I met Ashin Wirathu, a controversial Buddhist monk who has driven much of the anti-Muslim campaign in recent years, he was unrepentant and trotted out a litany of conspiracy theories about the country’s Muslims, which include ethnic Chinese as well as Rohingya.
Advertisement
AFTER THE ELECTIONS: Three electoral colleges will be formed comprising elected representatives of the upper house, the lower house and appointed military representatives from both houses.
