Myanmar’s winds of change

AUNG San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) have won a major victory, although how complete it is will not be clear for some days. But it is not too early to say that it is a reward for a life devoted to the task of restoring democracy to her country.

Suu Kyi is barred from the nation’s executive presidency, but will now almost certainly be able to put forward a candidate for the post. She has said that she would lead the government whether or not she was the president. But the important question is not whether she can form a government, but whether she can rule.

This is not a constitutional issue, but one concerning military, economic and social power. The constitution needs to be changed, and until it is, Myanmar will not have full democracy.

Yet it is the broader balance between two centres of power — the democratic, rooted in parliament, and the military, entrenched in the state’s institutions — that matters most. Suu Kyi and her party had already changed that balance, although the military’s reforms also played a part.

For example, the era in which electoral success could simply be negated by the army has passed. So has the time when an election could be crudely fixed, which has also happened in the past. Now the NLD can claim to represent the people in a way it could not when it had only a small number of seats won in byelections, which is where it stood previously, after declining to contest the last election in 2010.

The relative legitimacy of the NLD and the military-dominated institutions of the state has shifted even more towards the former.

But that does not mean that the military class, with its control of the security forces, its huge economic holdings and a substantial social constituency, much of which is not in uniform, is on the ropes.

The political contest is now more subtle but no less sharp. The military class and Suu Kyi and the NLD will continue in an uneasy and rivalrous relationship. It will have aspects of both reluctant partnership and a continuing struggle. There will be bargaining and manoeuvring in the months between now and March, when the next president will be chosen. But the conflict in the longer run will be about who can cope with the pressure for change and improvement in Myanmar society.

Sunday’s lengthy queues of orderly and patient voters were a symptom of that pressure: the people of Myanmar were giving notice, more forcefully than in the past, that they must and will have change. London, November 10