IF THE election in 44 byelections of 43 supporters of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) is confirmed, as expected, her party will not just have struck a resounding blow for democracy in Burma, but dealt a devastating psychological blow to its ruling party.
If confirmed, the landslide would mean the NLD even captured four seats in the capital, Naypyitaw, a new city built by the former junta, where most of the residents are government employees and military personnel, the backbone of 50 years of military rule in either its old or current quasi-civilian forms. Major disaffection at the heart of the beast, it appears – Et tu Brute!
The first election in two decades in which voters have had the chance to back Suu Kyi’s party has been relatively free of abuses, opposition activists say, compared to the brutality of the former regime: NLD candidates complain of some harassment, the dead voted in the best Irish tradition, and government officials defaced posters. But the gamble taken by the NLD in contesting the polls – it boycotted the 2010 general election – does seems to have been vindicated and propels Nobel Prize winner Suu Kyi into her first elected office.
The last time the National League for Democracy was on the ballot, in 1990, it won a resounding victory. But the junta ignored the result and in subsequent years crushed the opposition.
Over the last year the newly installed civilian government, run by a party dominated by former officers under President Thein Sein, and widely seen as a proxy for the military, moved to dismantle some of the state’s repressive apparatus. The Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) has freed many political prisoners, allowed trade unions to function, and relaxed media curbs as well as opening talks with ethnic minority rebels. Observers also note a distinct and welcome distancing by the new government from the country’s traditional orbit of giant neighbour China.
The election of 43 opposition activists to the 664-seat parliament - the military have reserved a quarter of the seats for themselves – comes nowhere near to upsetting the USDP majority and the 60-million-strong country remains far from democratic. But the election may allow, with Suu Kyi’s likely blessing, both the EU and US to begin to ease the 20-year sanctions which have hobbled the economy. Despite being rich in natural resources, one-third of its people still lives on less than 35 cents a day. At last the first shoots in a Burma spring.