Myanmar’s military junta leader Min Aung Hlaing said Sunday that the country’s elections were “free and fair” even though they are being held by the same armed forces that overthrew the civilian government in a coup five years ago and are governing under a regime contested by the international community.
“We guarantee that it will be a free and fair election,” Min Aung Hlaing told reporters after voting in the capital Naypyidaw. According to him, the legitimacy of the election will not be called into question because it is organized by the military, responsible for the coup d’état which brought the junta to power.
Since Sunday, Myanmar’s military junta has been holding elections that it presents as a return to democratic normality, five years after the coup that sparked a civil war. The election is seen by critics and international observers as an attempt to legitimize the military regime, which annulled the results of the 2020 elections amid allegations of large-scale fraud.
The military-aligned Union, Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) is the main participant in the vote and represents more than a fifth of the candidates, according to the Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL). Former leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), which won the last election in a landslide, will not contest the vote.
The NLD and most of the parties competing in 2020 have been dissolved. According to ANFREL, parties having won around 90% of the seats in this election will be eliminated from the race. Voting will take place in three stages over the course of a month and will use new electronic voting machines, which do not allow manual registration of candidates or invalid votes.
The civil war has seen the military lose control of large areas of Myanmar to rebel forces, and voting will not take place in territories under the control of these groups. A census released by the junta itself last year acknowledged that around 19 million people, out of a population of more than 50 million, were unregistered due to “security restrictions”.
In this context, the authorities canceled the elections for 65 of the 330 seats in the Lower House. More than a million stateless Rohingya, who have been living as refugees in Bangladesh since a military crackdown that began in 2017, will also be excluded from the vote.
ANFREL clarifies that the Union Election Commission, responsible for overseeing elections, is controlled by the armed forces and does not act independently. The body’s head, Than Soe, was appointed after the ouster of Aung San Suu Kyi’s government and is the target of sanctions and travel bans imposed by the European Union for “undermining democracy” in the country.
Since the coup, the junta has blocked social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and X and passed laws providing for up to ten years in prison for any protest or criticism of the elections. More than 200 people have already been prosecuted based on this legislation, including in cases relating to private messages on social media, flash protests, distribution of leaflets and vandalism of campaign materials.
The regime invited international observers, but received little support. According to state media, one of the few delegations to arrive in the country came from Belarus, ruled since 1994 by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko.
Understanding the electoral process
Seats in parliament will be allocated according to a combined system of simple majority and proportional representation, which ANFREL says largely favors the major parties. The criteria for registering as a national party capable of running for seats in various areas was tightened, according to the Asian Election Observation Organization, and only six of 57 candidate parties qualified.
Results are expected by the end of January. Whatever the outcome of the vote, a military-drafted constitution stipulates that a quarter of parliamentary seats will be reserved for the armed forces. The lower house, upper house, and members of the armed forces each elect a vice president from among their members, and the joint parliament votes which of the three will be elevated to the presidency.
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