The outgoing ruling party, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), nominated Sai Mauk Kham, a current vice president, in the lower house, and Khun Aung Myint, a former chairman of the upper house, in the upper house.
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The NLD also nominated ethnic Chin MP Henry Van Theu, a law graduate, as a presidential candidate from the upper house.
Three candidates will be put to a vote of the combined houses.
The army is expected to is likely to propose its candidate next week, officials told reporters.
The electoral system of Myanmar requires that the president be voted in from a selection of names put forward by lawmakers and the losing candidates will become vice-presidents.
The NLD had refused to say who would be president until Thursday.
Htin Kyaw is widely expected to get the nod, owing to his long-standing and close relationship with Suu Kyi-and the NLD leader’s admission that the individual she sends to the Presidential Palace will be expected to follow her instructions without fail.
Even as Thursday marked a historic day, the coming scrutiny process and five-year term of whoever becomes president are best viewed as political milestones marked with an asterisk, given that NLD chairwoman Aung San Suu Kyi has said she will be “above” whichever individual is selected. With Suu Kyi insisting that she would nonetheless remain “above the presidency”, the discussion over the past few months has shifted to who she might tap from within the NLD to serve as an effective proxy president, with her still wielding considerable power in practice.
Thein Sein, whose quasi-civilian government took power in 2011, has ushered in a raft of political and economic reforms that saw most sanctions lifted.
Many in Myanmar had clung to faint hopes that the 70-year-old democracy campaigner could still be named president, but months of talks with the powerful military failed to remove the legal obstacles in her way.
The 2008 military-written constitution bans Suu Kyi from becoming president because she married a foreigner and their children are not Myanmar citizens.
The former ruling generals held Suu Kyi under house arrest for 15 years and swatted away the NLD’s 1990 election landslide. He runs a charity founded by Suu Kyi and has been a trusted member of her inner circle since the mid-1990s. He went to the same secondary school as Suu Kyi and graduated from the Yangon Institute of Economics in 1962.
In a statement on Thursday, before the nomination was revealed, Suu Kyi urged patience from her supporters.
She added that she would persevere and asked for people’s continued support “to reach the goal peacefully”. He is not a lawmaker, but was in the parliamentary complex when the vote took place.
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In a varied career, Mr Htin Kyaw worked as a university teacher and also held positions in the industry and foreign affairs ministries in the late 1970s and 80s before retiring from government service as the military tightened its grip. “This makes him an easier target for military leaders keen to reassert control”, he said in comments emailed to the AP.
