Covering Myanmar elections: A record of broken promises

The Irrawaddy

The Myanmar people, or at least some of them, have been to the polls, and it’s the sixth time I have covered such an event for international and regional media. This time it was easy, because the exercise was obviously a military-orchestrated mockery of how elections should be held. The National League for Democracy (NLD) and all other major pro-democracy parties had been dissolved for failing to re-register under the rules of a new, strict Political Parties Registration Law, which the junta enacted in January 2023. Other draconian laws specifically designed to crush any form of dissent or criticism were also introduced, primarily the July 2025 Law on the Protection of Multiparty Democratic General Elections from Obstruction, Disruption, and Destruction, under which violators could face years in prison and even the death penalty.

Not to anybody’s surprise, the military’s own political outfit, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), scored what officials called a landslide victory, capturing 341 of the available 420 seats in both houses of parliament. The rest went to smaller, military-aligned parties and then, as before, the 2008 Constitution gives the armed forces a quarter of the seats in both houses of parliament. The new parliament—and, especially, the government—will be dominated by former military officers who have become “civilians.” Under their governance, any kind of change to the fundamental, military-dominated power structure is out of the question and, moreover, after lessons learned from the 2011-2021 decade of relative openness, it is highly unlikely that kind of policy will be repeated.

The first election I covered was the one that was held in May 1990. It was surprisingly free and fair and resulted in a massive, landslide victory for the NLD. The party captured 392 of the 485 seats contested in elections to the 492-member assembly, which the military authorities had pledged would function as a unicameral Pyithu Hluttaw, or national parliament. Several foreign correspondents were allowed to witness the elections, but I was not one of them. I was still on the military’s blacklist but was able to cover events from Bangkok. There was understandably jubilation inside the country and among the many people of different nationalities who had fled to Thailand after the bloody events of August-September 1988. The military’s National Unity Party (NUP), previously known as the ruling Burma Socialist Programme Party, had been roundly defeated, winning in only 10 constituencies.

A week after the elections, I was in Hong Kong where the head office of the magazine I wrote for at that time, the Far Eastern Economic Review, was located. And I did not share the view then held by many foreign observers and even diplomats that the elections should be viewed as a democratic break-through. One morning, Radio Hong Kong rang the hotel where I was staying, asking for an interview about the positive developments in Myanmar.  My answer was not what the presenter had expected. I said: “There is no way the generals are going to retire in a house by a lake and say, when we ruled the country, those were the days boys. They will manipulate the outcome and do everything in their power to prevent the NLD from forming a government.” The interviewer was taken aback: “But they can’t do that, the outcome of the election is crystal clear.” My reply was that they can and will do precisely that. Luckily, the interview was live on Hong Kong radio, so the interviewer couldn’t cut me off. But the interview stopped earlier than intended, and I am sure the interviewer thought he had had a madman on the line.

However, in the end that was what happened. Since the wrong party had won, the rules had to change. On July 27, two months after the election, military intelligence chief Khin Nyunt appeared, claiming that a “constituent assembly”, vested only with the task of drafting a new constitution, had been elected, not a parliament. He added: “It should not be necessary to explain that a political organization does not automatically obtain the three sovereign powers of the legislative, administrative and judicial powers by the emergence of a Pyithu Hluttaw…only the SLORC [the then junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council] has the right to legislative power…drafting an interim constitution to obtain state power and to form a government will not be accepted in any way and if it is done effective action will be taken according to the law.”

It surprises me today that many foreign Myanmar watchers continue to claim that the 1990 election was for a constituent assembly, not a parliament.

And in the end, the elected body did not even become a constituent assembly charged with drafting a constitution; in fact, it was never convened. Instead, 100 of the 485 elected MPs were designated to participate in a “National Convention”, sitting alongside 600 additional non-elected representatives appointed by the military for the purpose of drafting a new constitution. It was not until 18 years later that the task was eventually completed.

The country had not yet recovered from Nargis, a devastating cyclone which made landfall in Myanmar in early May 2008 killing over 130,000 people, when a referendum on the constitution was held. Altogether 99.7 percent of 22.5 million eligible voters were supposed to have gone to the polls on May 10, while in the worst cyclone-affected areas voters had to wait until May 24. The result was, the authorities claimed, that 92.4 percent had voted in favor of the new charter. The referendum was billed by the military as ushering in a new era of “discipline-flourishing genuine multiparty democracy.” But because of Nargis, the referendum was hardly mentioned in the international media. The Far Eastern Economic Review had by then been closed down by Dow Jones, the owner, but I did a short piece for the Swedish paper Svenska Dagbladet calling the referendum a farce.

Two-and-a-half years later—on November 7, 2010—elections were held for a bicameral parliament. An upper house, the Amyotha Hluttaw, was going to have 224 seats and then a lower house, the Pyithu Hluttaw, 440 seats. It came as no surprise that the USDP won. Again, I was not allowed into the country to cover the election, but two weeks before it was held, I did an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal headlined “The Generals’ Election.” I wrote that “Western countries are naïve to think that Burma’s junta is taking steps towards a competitive democracy… Article 396 of the new constitution ensures that they [the elected MPs] can be dismissed for ‘misbehavior’…and if the ‘democratic’ situation gets really out of hand, Article 413 gives the president the right to hand over executive as well as judicial powers to the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.”

Thein Sein, a former general and junta secretary, formed a new government in March 2011 and began taking a series of initiatives aimed at opening the country to the outside world as well as permitting political freedoms, which many foreign observers misinterpreted as the beginning of a transition to actual democracy. But I disagreed. In December 2010, a month after the election, I had written an article for the South Korean English-language quarterly Global Asia, in which I stated, “Don’t believe all the hype, all we are seeing is the illusion of change.” I was severely criticized for that and what I had written for the Wall Street Journal, especially by an academic website in Australia called The New Mandala. I was labeled pessimistic and cynical, and blasted for not recognizing all the positive “reforms” Thein Sein had initiated. But those were not genuine reforms, because the 2008 Constitution remained in place and could not be altered without the consent of the military. And when the situation did get “out of hand” following the NLD’s election victories in 2015 and 2020, we all know that the military did step in.

I was allowed into Myanmar to cover the 2015 and 2020 elections. I went to Yangon and elsewhere, visited polling stations and talked to ordinary people. On November 12, 2015, I wrote for Yale Global Online that “Opposition wins in Myanmar, but the military still holds the reins…Myanmar’s military is autonomous and does not take orders from the president or the government.” On December 1, 2015, I wrote a similar article for The Irrawaddy, which stated that “Burma’s generals got the constitution they wanted, hence the NLD’s victory is unlikely to affect the country’s power structure with the military as its apex.” When Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was allowed to form an NLD-led government in April 2016, I was, again, accused of being cynical for not seeing that Myanmar was on the road to democracy. I responded that I was only being realistic. A government dominated by the NLD would not be able to challenge that basic power structure, which was guaranteed under the 2008 Constitution.

After the November 2020 election I was a bit overly optimistic and wrote for Asia Times on November 9 that the generals, after two NLD landslides, may finally have realized that standing behind their own parties, the NUP in the 1990 election and the USDP after that, was a mistake. The military would logically have to learn to co-exist with the NLD. But that turned out to be wrong. Logic did not come into it. And one USDP leader, parliamentary speaker Thura Shwe Mann, who had actually tried to open a degree of cooperation with the NLD, had been ousted and ostracized from the military community.

Then, in late 2020, Min Aung Hlaing began dropping hints about “election fraud” and coup rumors started to circulate in Yangon. On January 30, 2021, I wrote an article for Asia Times headlined “To coup or not to coup in Myanmar”, basically saying that the country was on the brink of a military takeover and “it would not be difficult for the military to manufacture a crisis that allowed it to legally take over under a national security provision in the constitution.” Two days later, the military did decide to intervene.

President U Win Myint, who belonged to the NLD, naturally refused to comply with the military’s request to take over absolute power constitutionally, so he was dismissed and arrested, and the military-appointed vice president, General Myint Swe, took over and happily agreed to let Commander-in-Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing form a new administration. And the rest is history.

I am not sure when I will be able to go back to Myanmar and, perhaps, cover yet another election. But what I have learned from past experiences is that listening to ordinary people rather than foreign policy pundits is the way to find out what may or may not happen. I am not an astrologer; my predictions and conclusions have always been based on what I have heard and learned from meetings with people at the grassroots level. And I have always appreciated the cooperation I have got from Myanmar journalists, who remain much better informed—and realistic—than outside so-called experts.