Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD party has swept the boards of Burma’s 2015 general election taking a landslide win and an absolute majority in both the upper and lower houses of government. While the party leader has openly commented that she would rule the government, she will not be aloud to run for the Presidency of the country, which will be elected next year, because the military dictated constitution prohibits her from doing so. Read more about the historic victory with our post on the win.
Pre-election buildup
It was difficult for many to get excited about the prospect of Burma’s 2015 general election considering the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi, one of the most popular political figures in the country and the opposition party leader, is still barred from taking the presidency due to a constitutional technicality. However, where Myanmar is concerned, the potential for democratic change is a relatively new development and while Suu Kyi didn’t have enough time and tailwind to usher in the constitutional changes needed to amend the block, there could still be more progress to true democracy on the cards for the people of Burma.
The steps that she needs to go through to overturn the exclusions before the general election in November 2015 were significant and though this is inevitably what her National League for Democracy (NLD) party were working towards, there was the more pressing job job of preparing for the general election to take care of too. The constitutional anomaly that prevents her from taking the presidency, which excludes anyone with a spouse or children who are foreign citizens, came into effect in 2008 and to overturn this she will need a 75% vote in her favour. This task would be difficult enough on its own, but with a quarter of the seats in both houses of Burmese government reserved for the military, it’s almost impossible to achieve ahead of the 2015 election. It’s likely that this will be a part of the party’s plan during its term as the ruling majority, but the military factor of the government have the ability to block any constitutional amends outright, so unless she gets their support no changes will take place.
It’s widely believed that the 2008 constitutional change was put in place specifically to keep her out of the presidential office considering the fact that she was married to British writer Michael Aris before his death in 1999 and their two sons were forced to take British citizenship in 1989 when their previous Burmese citizenship was stripped of them by the ruling Junta military government. The situation seems even more targeted when you add to this the long history of house arrest that she has been forced to endure as she was prevented from taking her rightful place at the head of the government during the 1990 general election, when the NLD won 59% of the national votes and 392 of the 485 seats in Parliament.
Though things have changed dramatically in recent years with Suu Kyi being freed in 2010, there’s still a long way to go in terms of true democracy with such a sizable body of seats reserved for unelected military personnel and their veto power over constitutional amends. However, in the 2012 by-elections she made it into the lower house of the Burmese government, along with 42 other NLD politicians that were freely elected, so there has been a lot of progress in since her release.
When the opposition party decided to run for the elections, they did so on the back of significant momentum as the 43 seats won in 2012 were out of a possible 45 vacant seats, one of which they didn’t run for. On a positive note, incumbent president and leader of the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), Thein Sein, reiterated the government’s pledge to hold free and fair elections in 2015 in his New Year message in January 2015. While it looks unlikely that Suu Kyi will be able to orchestrate the constitutional change needed to free her path to the presidency, the NLD has managed to win the majority of seats in the two houses in the 2015 Burmese elections.
