Myanmar’s election may hold a few surprises

YANGON - Seldom has an election raised so few expectations as Myanmar’s upcoming polls in Myanmar Nov 7, the first elections in the country in 20 years.

The outcome of last election May 27, 1990 surprised the country’s ruling generals and fostered great expectations that democracy was afoot in the politically benighted land.

Myanmar’s military masters have spent the past two decades squashing those expectations and making sure there are no surprises this time round.

“It is clear that a repeat of the 1990 democratic landslide is statistically impossible,” said Richard Horsey, a former liaison officer of the International Labour Organization in Yangon, who now works for the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum.

The 1990 polls were won by the National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Aung San Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest at the time. The party won 392 of the 447 contested seats, compared with the pro-military National United Party’s 10.

The junta blocked the NLD from power and has kept Nobel Peace Prize laureate Suu Kyi under house arrest for 15 of the past 20 years.

She will most likely remain so Nov 7, although she may be released Nov 13, when her latest 18-month sentence is due to expire.

The NLD is boycotting the polls and urging its followers not to vote.

There are approximately 30 million eligible voters in Myanmar, out of a population of 50.5 million.

“This election is just for establishing a mechanism of military administration. That’s why we urge ‘no vote’,” NLD spokesman Nyan Win said.

Not everyone agrees.

“I will vote because it is my right to choose whomever I like,” said Myo Aung, 45, a Yangon-based book publisher. “I expect a change after the election; at least we can have some rights to express our views freely.”

The National Democracy Front (NDF), a breakaway faction of the NLD, has fielded 160 candidates to contest for 1,159 seats in three parliamentary houses: lower, upper and state/regional.

“What I experienced in my recent campaign among the public is amazing,” NDF deputy leader Thein Nyunt said. “There was good reaction from people. People said they will stand with the peasant’s hat (the party’s logo).”

If the NDF were to win every seat it contested, it could muster up to 30 percent in the lower and upper houses, making it a considerable opposition voice.

But there are 37 parties and 82 independents in the race, which will be hotly contested in urban centres such as Yangon and Mandalay, while the hinterlands will be dominated by military parties.

The pro-junta Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) and the junta-sympathetic National Unity Party (NUP) have fielded candidates in nearly every constituency.

Although the junta has barred international observers, it will allow Yangon-based diplomats and journalists to observe 18 locations nationwide.

Myanmar watchers said the polls may be relatively “free and fair”, partly because everything leading up the polls has not been.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t any significant intimidation or violence on voting day, because the whole system is set up to be coercive,” said David Mathieson, senior Myanmar researcher for Human Rights Watch.

Besides imprisoning Suu Kyi, rigging regulations that effectively excluded the NLD from the polls and limiting the number of candidates that other parties could afford to field, the junta’s constitution mandates that 25 percent of all legislative seats be reserved for the military.

That doesn’t mean there will be no surprises at the Nov 7 polls. One wildcard is the NUP, which represented the military in the 1990 polls and is more associated with the era of Ne Win, the military strongman during 1962-88, than with Than Shwe, junta leader since 2002.

Should the NUP do well, winning 30 percent of the seats, it could conceivably ally with other parties to counter the clout of the appointed military/USDP alliance in the post-election period, when a president must be appointed.

“While the NUP is certainly not a natural ally of the democratic parties, there are reasons to believe that it is much more independent of the regime and military than is commonly assumed,” Horsey speculated in his recent paper Myanmar: A Pre-election Primer.