Myanmar faces historic election with potential to end military rule

Share

Poverty drove Ei Ei Pyone from Myanmar six years ago. When her family's tailor shop in a rural township west of Rangoon fell on hard times, she left for Singapore to earn money, taking jobs as a housemaid and office worker.

Six years later, the 34-year-old woman with a ponytail and an easy smile, wearing a sarong-like longyi she made herself, is back home, hustling around her hometown on the back of a motorcycle. She ducks into poorly lit bamboo-stick houses to introduce herself as the lower-house candidate for the National League for Democracy, the party led by democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi that is campaigning to sweep the country's decades-old military leadership out of power.

Ms. Ei Ei Pyone is on a ballot together with a civil servant who spent his life training poor farmers. Their opponents are with the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party – a colonel who has spent 18 years as a national minister and mayor of Naypyidaw, Myanmar's capital, and a wealthy businessman whose daughters were educated in California and whose family employs more than 2,500 people at hotels, an overcoat factory and a construction firm.

It's clear who are the underdogs. But they may well win.

Myanmar's power elite once seemed impregnable. Since 1962, the military has ruled the former Burma with an iron first, jailing critics and occasionally shutting down universities and nightclubs while filling personal bank accounts with the proceeds of selling the country's timber and precious stones. They brokered no dissent. Even when they decided to allow elections, the strongmen stayed in control, drafting a constitution that kept the military out of civilian hands (the president is not commander-in-chief) and guaranteed men in uniform a quarter of the seats in parliament.

They opened a crack for democracy with a 2010 general election widely considered rigged – and boycotted by Ms. Suu Kyi, then still under house arrest – and then a 2012 by-election, where too few seats were in play to pose a threat to the ruling USDP (many of its members are former officers).

Now, Ms. Suu Kyi wants to blow apart the military's careful order.

The Sunday election will mark the first time she can herself cast a ballot at home, as her party contests a national election in hopes it can win so "overwhelmingly," as the Nobel laureate put it Thursday, that it can build a "genuine democratic society." Ms. Suu Kyi has publicly set her sights on an electoral sweep and needs two-thirds of available seats to amend the constitution.

Such a landslide would mark a resounding repudiation of a military regime that "proved they couldn't run the government over the past five decades, when the country has fallen into the abyss of economic and political crisis," says Kyaw Zwa Moe, English editor of the Irrawaddy, a pioneering news publication.

For doubters of Myanmar's reforms, too, the election is a pivotal moment, because if Ms. Suu Kyi's NLD "wins a massive victory and then gets to nominate a president – if that's the scenario, that's a wow moment," says Richard Horsey, a Myanmar analyst with International Crisis Group.

But the path there is not without obstacles. Ethnic areas account for more than a quarter of seats, and in many of those places, local parties command strong allegiances. Nationalist monks have sought to rally opinion against Ms. Suu Kyi. The ruling USDP party retains significant support in some areas and has shown skill at manipulating elections in the past. Ms. Suu Kyi claims there have been dozens of violations of election laws, and warned that the current campaign and advanced voting have already been marked by intimidation and fraud.

"Vote buying is happening," says Bridget Welsh, a Myanmar expert who is a senior research associate at Ipek University. But, she says, "it's not happening to the extent that it happens in other parts of Southeast Asia." Other election observers have expressed cautious optimism that the vote will be relatively free and fair.

The election has already taken on "tremendous symbolic importance" among a population eager to taste a little more freedom, Ms. Welsh says. "In a country where people haven't had real reason to smile and a real reason to look forward, this is actually really generating some optimism."

Under the single bare fluorescent bulb in her home in Maubin, Ei Shwe Sin says she is "happy, because I can vote for the one I want" – the woman she calls "Mother Suu."

"I believe she can take care of everything for both poor people and farmers, for development needs," she says. "Because the current government has done nothing."

On a nearby road, the bright red flag of Ms. Suu Kyi's NLD party waves from Than Tun's rickshaw. Under the military, his farmland was seized and he was summoned to forced labour. It's not something he is prepared to forget, or forgive.

"We have suffered a lot. That's why I will vote for my Mother," he says.

But many are willing to look past the military roots of the current government. Not far away, Maung Myat Thein proudly displays a USDP flag on his rickshaw, which he recently paid off after the party offered two-year, low-interest loans. He beams with the pride of a man who has finally, at 65, achieved a measure of financial stability. "I own this and all the money I make belongs to me," he says.

Restaurant owner Ma Tin Tin Nyo says the USDP has her vote because it paved the road out front and distributed vaccines. "The President has been faithful to our country," she says. "Because of him, everyone can now get a mobile phone, even the plastic collector on the street."

U Yan Win, the businessman running against Ms. Ei Ei Pyone, argues that a military-backed party is best for the country, and that Ms. Suu Kyi's desire for rapid change could be destabilizing. "We will have less mistakes if we change gradually," he says. His party's focus on the market economy is better, he argued, pointing to a plan he helped to develop to raise national tourist visits to 7.5 million by 2020, and tourist revenue to $7.5-billion (U.S.). "All people will benefit from that income," he says.

Ms. Ei Ei Pyone, meanwhile, touts her own leader's promise to raise incomes for workers. She knows she doesn't look as qualified on paper as her opponents. Her campaign expenses of about $2,500 pale when compared with those of her opponents, who have twin 13-foot TV screens mounted on a heavy truck that they drive around town.

Better equipped and better funded, Mr. U Yan Win hit some 100 villages this campaign. Ms. Ei Ei Pyone only made it to 50. But what she has is a vision, caught in Singapore, of a more open country with less corruption and none of the military's history of mistreatment.

"What we need are people who are good rather than people who are educated," she says. "This is not a race between the USDP and the NLD. It's more about what is just and what is unjust."