YANGON: Myanmar’s junta presides over elections starting on Sunday (Dec 28), advertising the vote as a return to democratic normality five years after it mounted a coup that triggered civil war.
The vote has been widely slated as a charade to rebrand the rule of the military, which voided the results of the last elections in 2020, alleging massive voter fraud.
Here are some key questions surrounding the heavily restricted polls:
WHO IS RUNNING
The pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party is by far the biggest participant, providing more than a fifth of all candidates, according to the Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL).
Former democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her massively popular National League for Democracy party, which won a landslide in the last vote, are not taking part.
After the 2021 coup, Suu Kyi was jailed on charges rights groups say were politically motivated.
According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners advocacy group, some 22,000 political prisoners are languishing in junta jails.
The National League for Democracy and most of the parties that took part in the 2020 vote have been dissolved. ANFREL says organisations that won 90 per cent of seats then will not be on Sunday’s ballot.
Polling is taking place in three phases spread over a month, using new electronic voting machines which do not allow write-in candidates or spoiled ballots.
WHO CAN AND CANNOT VOTE?
Myanmar’s civil war has seen the military lose swathes of the country to rebel forces – a mix of pro-democracy guerillas and ethnic minority armies which have long resisted central rule – and the vote will not take place in the areas they control.
A military-run census last year admitted it could not collect data from an estimated 19 million of the country’s 50 million-odd inhabitants, citing “security constraints”.
Amid the conflict, authorities have cancelled voting in 65 of the 330 elected seats of the lower house – nearly one in five of the total.
More than one million stateless Rohingya refugees, who fled a military crackdown beginning in 2017 and now live in exile in Bangladesh, will also have no say.
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