The latest on landmark elections in Myanmar.
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“When I cast my vote I was very excited and so anxious that I might do something wrong that my hands were shaking”, said Kay Khine Soe, in Suu Kyi’s Kawhmu constituency. A charismatic orator, she found herself in a leading role in the burgeoning pro-democracy movement, delivering speeches to crowds of hundreds of thousands. It has not said when final results are expected.
Hlaing Myint, a sales manager, waited for five hours, but said it was worth it.
The NLD believes a fair vote will power it into government after a decades- long struggle against army dictatorship. “I’m voting for NLD”. The official results of the election are expected to be announced Monday. “I couldn’t sleep the whole night, so I came here early”, said Ohnmar, a 38-year-old woman who goes by one name. “This is the happiest day of my life”. Maung Maung Hla, 39, a driver, proudly his ink-stained pinky Sunday, evidence that he’d cast his vote. Recognising the election result is the way of democratic practice.
In a press conference on Thursday, Suu Kyi if her party wins the majority of seats in parliament, she will govern the country anyway.
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But election officials insisted early voting was going well. “We were hoping that somehow we’d be allowed to vote. But today I have lost hope of any change in my lifetime”.
Since taking power, President Thein Sein, a member of the former junta, and his government have opened industries such as energy exploration, banking and telecommunications to foreign participation in a bid to bring Myanmar out of economic isolation.
The head of the European Union’s election monitoring team, Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, offered cautious optimism. With three polling stations at the school, over 600 are in line to vote.
“We have not seen signs of cheating [in the vote]”, he said, warning that risks remained during the transportation and counting of the ballots. “All of the media and all of the observers everybody should focus on a few of the place in the remote area”.
“This is the only way to change things”, he said. “This is very important day for my country”. It has monitored elections in 101 countries.
Gen Than Shwe, who headed the junta for almost two decades until 2011, slipped into a small voting booth with his wife in an outlying village yesterday.
In a country where many people are superstitious, a straw poll of soothsayers indicated a victory for Ms Suu Kyi, the daughter of the country’s independence hero Aung San.
Her father Aung San fought for and against both the British and the Japanese colonisers as he jostled to give his country the best shot at independence. She then walked away without stopping to talk to journalists.
The general elections are seen as the first real chance for democracy to take root in Myanmar. They are expected to be won by Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party.
Ethnic parties will be looking for return favours to join any coalition and Suu Kyi would need to carefully consider who she reaches out to, aware that an alliance could collapse if expectations aren’t met.
I watched people lining up in the dark long before the polling station opened in the Kyi Myin Daing neighbourhood, which straddles the Yangon River.
The ruling USDP expects to win 40 per cent of seats in the parliament from voters across the entire country.
Nobel peace laureate Suu Kyi won the last free vote in 1990, but the military ignored the result. It finally held new elections in 2010, which the opposition boycotted, citing unfair election laws.
“I wanted to vote”, she said.
Numerous voters in the district, where Suu Kyi lives in a lake-side home, are from affluent families. Residents there – among the 70 percent of the country that still ekes out a living in agriculture – said they that were more concerned about their livelihoods of river fishing and farming than politics, and that their local candidates had never come to see them.
The day belonged to the queues of people, many wearing traditional longyi sarongs, who swarmed to polling stations across the nation.
His army-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) is the main obstacle to an NLD victory.
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More than 30 million eligible voters will cast ballots for the upper and lower houses of parliament and state and regional assemblies.
