Aung San Suu Kyi’s party confident of Myanmar election victory

Yangon, Myanmar, Nov 9 (efe-epa).- The party of Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Monday was confident it had secured a resounding victory in the parliamentary election over the weekend, although the official result could take days to confirm.

It was the second round of elections since the country transitioned toward democracy a decade ago. The Southeast Asian country held its first free election in 2015.

“In all of the country we can say that we have won more seats than in the 2015 elections,” Myo Nyunt, a spokesman for the National League for Democracy, told Efe.

The NLD won a landslide victory in the 2015 election, taking 80% of the seats in parliament. It allowed Aung San Suu Kyi to form a government just five years after the end of a military dictatorship that had ruled the nation for around 50 years.

“According to the information we have, we have won in the regions of Irrawaddy, Tenasserim, Bago, Magway, Mandalay and Yangon, where we have lost one constituency, that of the Coco Islands,” he added.

The list of regions corresponds to central Myanmar, where some 60% of the population belong to the Bamar ethnic group, which provides a major pillar of support for Aung San Suu Kyi and her party.

In order to form a majority government without relying on other parties, the NLD needs to secure two-thirds of list constituencies, given that the Burmese Armed Forces are allocated 25% of seats in parliament, in accordance with the military-rule era 2008 constitution.

The NLD has been tipped to easily win Sunday’s election.

One of Aung San Suu Kyi’s foremost challenges will be to oversee a peace process with dozens of armed groups that continue to fight against the government. Some of the conflicts go as far back as 1948, when the country gained its independence from British colonial rule.

But her failure so far to bring peace to the country has seen many ethnic minority groups vote in favor of ethno-nationalist parties.

Sunday’s elections were suspended in 51 constituencies of the country due to ongoing conflict, leaving some 1.5 million people, the vast majority from ethnic minority groups, without the ability to vote.

The persecuted Rohingya Muslim group was also left disenfranchised in huge numbers. Around 500,000 are living as refugees in Bangladesh, having fled a brutal military crackdown in 2017.EFE-EPA

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