Fear and loathing greet Myanmar’s unfree election

WE FOUND THE NEIGHBOURHOOD sleeping under pale streetlamps and a half moon. A lone old man shuffled past on a 5am errand and pointed the way to the school, where voting was soon to begin.

Inside the dark compound, my Burmese colleague and I found a brightly lit classroom where polling staff were arranging tables, cardboard booths and electronic voting machines. They were mostly female teachers, joined by other junior government staff. When dawn came, so did two soldiers and an armed policeman, taking chairs 50 metres away.

The polling staff made nervous jokes as they primed the voting machines, whose heft and chunky buttons recalled a long-dead gadget from the 1970s. They then fastened seals on adjoining plastic boxes, where printed ballot receipts were to tumble unseen, and prepared pots of indelible ink to mark the fingers of voters.

The machines were new, and had been introduced with little transparency, but the seals and inkpots recalled similar safeguarding rituals from previous votes in 2015 and 2020. These elections were democratic milestones for Myanmar, resulting in landslide wins for the National League for Democracy (NLD) led by the dissident icon Aung San Suu Kyi. But here the rituals were in service of something entirely different. This election, which began on 28 December, with two subsequent phases of voting on 11 and 25 January, is at heart a coronation. 

The country’s military junta has purged its only serious rival, the NLD, from politics after toppling its administration and jailing its leaders in a 2021 coup. Meanwhile, most of the other parties that did well in 2020 have refused to register under draconian post-coup regulations. This has left no party capable of challenging the military’s proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), beyond carving out an impotent minority in parliament.

After the election, the new parliament will choose the president, who is widely expected to be the current junta chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing. Besides an assumed USDP majority, his anointment will also be eased by an article of Myanmar’s 2008 constitution, drafted by a previous junta. This article automatically grants a quarter of parliamentary seats to unelected members of the military, who will be even more loyal to the commander-in-chief.

The true safeguards for the military in this election are, therefore, political. They are not to be found at the polling station, but in all that the military has done to re-engineer politics beforehand, preserving its dominance in perpetuity.

This is perhaps why the junta took the rare step of allowing journalists in for the election. Foreign reporters like me, they may have hoped, would fixate on the relative order of the polling stations while ignoring the wider context or what ordinary people had to say. 

However, little could be done to hide the sparse voter turnout at most of the polling stations in Myanmar’s biggest city, Yangon. In 2015 and 2020, when the NLD was on the ballot, people formed snaking queues long before voting opened at 6 am, even though they had 10 more hours to vote. They were eager to exercise a right denied to them during previous decades of military rule. The mother of a local friend of mine hauled herself from her sickbed to vote in 2020, while the Covid-19 pandemic raged. Afterwards, she collapsed and was admitted to hospital. 

This time, the pre-dawn queues were replaced by a trickle of typically elderly voters. Most passed swiftly through the polling stations, but some were unable to find themselves on the voter list or complained of inaccurate personal details. “I’m going home!” shouted one middle-aged man whose registration had been botched. Another man was only able to vote after a local official was fetched to verify his residency in the neighbourhood.

There was a rich irony to these mishaps. The military had overturned the results of the 2020 election, with its NLD landslide, while alleging massive errors in the voter list. The current list was compiled with the help of a household census that, by the junta’s own admission, had missed an estimated 19 million out of 51 million people due to conflict. After the coup, protesters took up arms and allied with an array of veteran ethnic armed groups that have struggled for autonomy against the military for decades. Combine this expanded war with a general gutting of administrative capacity, and there was little reason to expect a better voter roll.