Myanmar takes the leap, but pitfalls lie ahead

The people of Myanmar – and the agencies that continue to exert control over much of everyday life – deserve a round of applause following Sunday’s elections. They have demonstrated that the country is indeed ready to move forward towards democracy.

The election had its flaws, of course. International observers voiced concern over the large number of seats reserved in the legislature for the military, over the disfranchisement of citizens who’d been able to vote in 

previous polls, and over the disqualification of dozens of candidates based on the arbitrary application of citizenship and residency requirements.

These issues need to be resolved before Myanmar can be truly said to have shed its authoritarian past. It’s to be hoped that, given the outcome on Sunday, the next time voters go to the polls will be in a climate of inclusiveness, free of bigotry and manipulation.

With votes still being counted, the ruling, military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) conceded defeat early yesterday afternoon. Nobel Peace prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) was anticipating 80-per-cent support in the polls.

While celebrating such a profound turn of events, it must be kept in mind that the next steps will be difficult, as well as critical in ensuring that democracy can take root.

At least there has been no indication that the ruling elite will repeat the ghastly mistake it made in 1990, when the NLD triumphed in an election, only to be denied power. The country then still known as Burma descended into a decade of darkness and instability, isolated as a pariah state.

President Thein Sein, Army Commander in Chief Min Aung Hlaing and Union Election Commission chairman Tin Aye have all said that this time they will accept the people’s decision.

However, there exists no clear decision as to how power is to be shared with the military, whose substantial presence in parliament is mandated in the republic’s constitution.

The NLD needed only to win 66.5 per cent of the 498 seats in the upper and lower houses to be eligible to govern without coalition support. A slimmer margin victory would have allowed the USDP to fashion a government from its affiliations with the military and sympathetic small and medium-size parties. With the military quota in hand, it required just 40 per cent of the seats in both houses.

The NLD appears to have cleared that hurdle with ease – and now faces another. The constitution prohibits Suu Kyi from becoming president, due to her having married a foreigner. “The Lady”, as she’s known to admirers, said last week it’s not a problem – she has “a plan” and her own position will be “above the president”. In that ex-officio role she might well be able to pull the strings but, in a country and in a parliament where the military will continue to have such sway, will she be able to keep the strings untangled?

The bigger question right now is who the NLD will name as president. The party’s single most-glaring flaw is that it is built around one person’s remarkable past and personality. No one else in its ranks comes close to matching Suu Kyi’s international appeal, so it’s difficult to imagine who will be its face to the world, attending overseas summits, if not her.

This muddled circumstance is at least better than an alternative being widely discussed in the days leading up to Sunday’s vote, that a lesser victory for the NLD could see it forming a coalition with the USDP and the military, leaving the smaller parties as an absurd “opposition”. If that had happened, even the noblest of compromises couldn’t have kept Myanmar on the road to democracy.