Aung San Suu Kyi’s party wins more than half of Myanmar vote in «landslide» victory

Supporters of the National League for Democracy celebrate in front of the party's headquarters in Yangon

Credit: YE AUNG THU /AFP

Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s ruling party said on Friday it would seek to form a government of national unity after official election results showed it had won an absolute majority in the parliamentary election. 

The latest batch of results from Sunday’s vote – the second ever free vote since the end of military rule — confirmed Ms Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) had secured 368 seats of the 434 seats that have so far been declared. 

That accounts for more than 50 percent of parliament. A quarter of seats are reserved for the military under the constitution.

NLD spokesman Monywa Aung Shin said the "landslide" win showed that the people still had faith in Suu Kyi’s leadership.

"However, we have to work on forming a national unity government," he added, noting how the NLD had invited 39 ethnic minority parties to work with it.

The military-aligned opposition Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) has been trounced across the country, winning just 25 seats by Friday.

The party alleges the vote was neither free nor fair and is demanding that the Union Election Commission (UEC) step down and polls be re-run.

International and domestic observers said the vote went smoothly and without major irregularities, although some condemned what they described as the election commission’s lack of transparency and its cancellation of the polls across many ethnic minority areas — ostensibly for security reasons.

The move left 1.5 million voters disenfranchised — including hundreds of thousands of Muslin minority Rohingya — sparking grievances in already restive areas that the playing field had been tilted in favour of the NLD.

Tension is particularly high in western Rakhine state, where fighting between ethnic Rakhine militant group, the Arakan Army, and the military has already displaced 200,000.

Myanmar has seen insurgencies by various autonomy-seeking guerrilla forces since shortly after its independence from Britain in 1948, and Suu Kyi’s government has been trying to conclude peace efforts though progress has been patchy and violence has flared in some areas.

The NLD’s comfortable win will be a welcome boost for Ms Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace laureate who has had a turbulent first term and struggled to meet high public expectations.

She is tasked with developing a country that suffered nearly 50 years of isolation and decay under strict military rule, years of which she was held under house arrest.

Ms Suu Kyi’s international reputation was badly hurt over the Rohingya crisis, for which the country now faces charges of genocide, something it denies. However, she remains widely revered within Myanmar.