POLLS have opened in Myanmar’s first general election since the country’s military toppled Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government in a 2021 coup.
The heavily restricted election on Sunday is taking place in about a third of the Southeast Asian nation’s 330 townships, with large areas inaccessible amid a raging civil war between the military and an array of opposition forces.
Following the initial phase, two rounds of voting will be held on January 11 and January 25, while voting has been cancelled in 65 townships altogether.
“This means that at least 20 percent of the country is disenfranchised at this stage,” said Al Jazeera’s Tony Cheng, reporting from Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon. “The big question is going to be here in the cities, what is the turnout going to be like?”
In Yangon, polling stations opened at 6am on Sunday (23:30 GMT, Saturday), and once the sun was up, “we’ve seen a relatively regular flow of voters come in,” said Cheng.
“But the voters are generally middle aged, and we haven’t seen many young people. When you look at the ballot, there are only few choices. The vast majority of those choices are military parties,” he said.
The election has been derided by critics – including the United Nations, some Western countries and human rights groups – as an exercise that is not free, fair or credible, with anti-military political parties not competing.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who was deposed by the military months after her National League for Democracy (NLD) won the last general election by a landslide in 2020, remains in detention, and her party has been dissolved.
The pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) is widely expected to emerge as the largest party.
The military, which has governed Myanmar since 2021, said the vote is a chance for a new start, politically and economically, for the nation of 55 million people, with Senior General Min Aung Hlaing consistently framing the polls as a path to reconciliation.
The military chief cast his ballot shortly after polling stations opened in Naypyidaw, the country’s capital.
The polls “will turn a new page for Myanmar, shifting the narrative from a conflict-affected, crisis-laden country to a new chapter of hope for building peace and reconstructing the economy”, an opinion piece in the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar said on Saturday.
