Many hope Sunday’s election will be the country’s freest and fairest for a generation but concerns abound in a country with a long history of the army stifling democracy.
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The group, led by Yohei Sasakawa, chairman of the philanthropic Nippon Foundation, will visit facilities including polling stations in the city on Saturday and Sunday, before returning to Japan on Monday.
We have the Mandela, she said, we don’t know if they’ve got the FW De Klerk.
What comes next will test the military’s willingness to share power and determine the pace of economic and political reforms.
Polls have opened in Myanmar’s general election – the first openly contested poll in 25 years after decades of military rule.
The USDP crowd was significantly smaller than the numbers drawn to Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy’s rally. That decision falls on the elected Parliamentarians of the Upper and Lower Houses, and the unelected military representatives. A shocked army refused to seat the winning lawmakers, with the excuse that a new constitution first had to be implemented – a task that ended up taking 18 years to accomplish. Thein Sein’s USDP and Suu Kyi’s party are the only two with national reach, although in Yangon it is hard to find anyone who professes to support the governing party.
It is up against the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), a military-backed behemoth stacked with former military cadres, including the bespectacled president Thein Sein, a one-time top ranking junta general.
The military’s parliamentary bloc votes how its commander-in-chief wants it to on major issues, while the army continues to wield financial clout through significant business and industrial interests. The mystique she enjoys as daughter of martyred independence leader Aung San, as leader of a doomed 1988 pro-democracy uprising and as a stalwart former political prisoner remains undiminished.
MYANMAR’S general election today – its first genuine multi-party elections since 1990 – is shaping up to be unprecedented in terms of transparency. Suu Kyi asked those listening in on the call to collect evidence of any threats or misconduct to allow the party to file complaints with the Union Election Commission after the poll. “Our ultimate goal is to amend the constitution and achieve national reconciliation”, he says.
But on Thursday Suu Kyi declared an NLD win would see her take a position “above the president“, laying down a firm challenge to the army which has at all turns tried to hamper her political ascent.
The NLD is banking on Suu Kyi’s personal popularity to sweep the party to power, though even if it wins she’s barred from the presidency because her children hold foreign passports.
Indeed, opponents like Republican Marco Rubio are already highlighting vulnerabilities in her tenure, pointing to chaos stirred by the U.S.-led operation in Libya and a busted “reset” of relations with Russian Federation – both of which she championed. The other two will become vice presidents.
“I will accept the new government formed, based on the election result”, current President Thein Sein said on Friday.
“I can see the Buddhist Rakhine, the Kaman Muslim and Hindus voting at a polling station close to the barricades”, he said in a telephone conversation. Political deadlock at a time of falling global demand for Myanmar’s commodity exports will be a disaster for the country’s poorest, as well as for its newly aspiring middle classes. They are being closely monitored by European Election observers.
Suu Kyi is barred from running for the presidency as her late spouse, with whom she had two sons, was foreign. The NLD must take 67% of all contested seats in order to gain a majority.
The USDP’s forecast of a win came as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) said the legitimacy of Myanmar’s elections had been severely undermined due to government decisions in the lead-up to the polls.
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Local reports indicate there has been a larger police presence on the streets in recent days, after around 40,000 so-called election police were recruited to maintain security.
