Suu Kyi’s leadership focus of Burma vote
YANGON, Burma — Voters in Burma’s biggest city, Yangon, turned up in large numbers Sunday to vote in nationwide elections that are expected to return to power the party of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party won the last elections in 2015 in a landslide, ending more than five decades of military-dictated rule in the country.
Traditional campaigning ahead of the election was severely limited by social distancing and quarantines for the coronavirus in some areas.
“The voter turnout here is more than we expected,” said Zaw Win Tun, a neighborhood administrator and official at Yangon’s Pho Myae polling station. “I think people are excited to vote, as they would like to escape from the political struggles. They want real democracy.” He did not elaborate, but appeared to be referring to a power struggle between Suu Kyi’s civilian government and the military.
The ability of Suu Kyi’s administration to run the country has been hamstrung by a clause in the 2008 army-drafted constitution giving the military 25% of the seats in parliament, allowing it to block constitutional changes.
More than 90 parties competed for seats in the lower and upper houses of parliament, while there were also elections at the state levels. There were more than 37 million people eligible to vote, including 5 million first-timers.
With the opposition in disarray, Suu Kyi, who is the nation’s leader with the title of state counsellor, remains Burma’s most popular politician. But her government has fallen short of expectations, with economic growth doing little to alleviate widespread poverty and a failure to ease tensions among the country’s fractious ethnic groups.
Suu Kyi’s main challenger, was the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, which has led the opposition in parliament.
The Election Commission said it would begin to announce results this morning. Polling stations began tallying the ballots as soon as voting ended, but it may take up to a week to collect all the votes.
The election was widely seen as a referendum on Suu Kyi’s leadership.
“There is no major party really putting an alternative, a credible alternative, forward,” Yangon-based political analyst Richard Horsey said, explaining part of the reason Suu Kyi’s side has a winning hand in Burma’s heartland, where its ethnic Burman majority lives.
Burma is often called Myanmar, a name that military authorities adopted in 1989. Some nations, such as the United States and Britain, have refused to adopt the name change.
The affection for Suu Kyi does not extend to the borderlands, the states occupied by the myriad ethnic minorities who have been seeking greater political autonomy for decades.
Suu Kyi’s ambitious plans to reconcile with the minorities have foundered. Their grievances have frequently flared up into armed rebellion, posing major threats to national security.
The ethnic political parties in 2015 had cooperated with Suu Kyi’s party to ensure victory. But this year, the ethnic parties, disappointed with her failure to reach a deal to expand their political rights, supported only their own candidates.
The plight of Burma’s Muslim Rohingya ethnic minority — an issue of major concern outside the country — played no real role in the campaign.