🇲🇲 Junta's USDP takes the lead — can you believe it!

Part one of garbage election down

Hello friends!

Happy new year — everything still sucks.

The first of many updates from Myanmar’s election this month. Voting began in December and will continue in January before the loaded house votes Min Aung Hlaing president for life or something.

Lots of great pieces recently, and I’ve included some of my favourites at the end.

See you later in the week,
Erin Cook

Min Aung Hlaing casts his vote (as per Mizzima TV on YouTube)

Voting has begun in Myanmar. ‘Sham’ is the word, I’m assuming because it’s the most polite version reflecting what’s happening.

It’s always important, I feel, to stress that the people of Myanmar had their say in 2020. They voted in a National League of Democracy government with a smattering of other parties and had that result stolen from them in February 2021. The National League of Democracy are not on the ballot in this shameful exercise after being forced to disband. An opportunity to re-register in line with the junta’s election rules was declined. With much of the NLD’s hierarchy locked up — including Aung San Suu Kyi — it would be very difficult to run.

The first round of voting took place on the 28th of December, with another two this month on the 11th and 25th. Turnout was desperately low at just over 50%. Let the junta try to mesmerise you with this line: “Even in developed democratic nations, there are situations where voter turnout does not exceed 50%,” junta spokesperson Zaw Min Tun said, adding it was a “source of pride.” Yeah, sure. (Lovely work from the Reuters story this comes from, a very handy map!)

It’s not quite the 101% gags of the USSR, but it’s enough for the junta-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party to say they’ve won hearts and minds. Results from day one show the party picking up 38 of 40 lower house seats up for grabs, Reuters reports. In the upper house, only one seat had been declared, and that’s gone to the Wa National Party.

An interesting one in Taunggyi, the capital of Shan State, where former lieutenant general Aung Aung lost out. As Myanmar Now puts it, the people of Taunggyi know him well as state-appointed chief minister, but much of the world — including scores of countries which have placed sanctions against him — know him better for his war crime accusations, including rape and extrajudicial killings against the Rohingya population in 2017.

He lost the capital’s seat for the lower house to Nan Kyin, running for the Pa-O National Organisation. Of course, the party has been approved to participate by the junta and, Myanmar Now reports, is the political wing of the Pa-O National Army, which fights alongside the junta in Shan State. Still, the outlet stresses, the rebuke of a high-profile representative in a prominent seat is important to note.

I really struggle to understand on a human level how this must feel to experience. It’s easy to be disgusted while reading my phone from a country where some days the biggest issue is the cricket not going long enough, but living it for years (after generations before lived it!) is really something. And what I deeply appreciate are the immensely brave people who take a risk and stop to tell media how it really is living under this junta.

“We are always living in fear … [Before the coup] we had such hope for the future. We were not at all afraid of our government. Now all that has changed,” one Yangon commuter told the Guardian quickly before rushing off. “We cannot speak our voices to others freely.”

A quick word from ASEAN

Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim got one under the wire on his penultimate day as ASEAN chair. Speaking to media on Dec 30, he said the bloc will be taking a wait-and-see approach before any sweeping arguments. He passed the baton to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr on the 1st.

“Any assessment will proceed in a sequenced manner, guided by the need to reduce violence, avoid actions that could deepen divisions or confer premature legitimacy, and preserve the possibility of an inclusive and credible pathway forward,” Anwar told media, as per the AFP.

‘Confer premature legitimacy’ is a sticky phrase to me. Let’s see what the Marcos era brings us.

• Why Military Parties Win Elections in Myanmar — The Irrawaddy

Now, in 2025, Myanmar is being asked to call another staged vote an election—under conditions that would be disqualifying in any serious democracy. The country is embroiled in a civil war. The voting is phased and geographically limited. The NLD has been dissolved and removed from legal politics. Its leader remains in detention. Whole segments of the public who once treated elections as a civic duty now treat them as a ritual of coercion.

Against that backdrop, a USDP “landslide” is not a political surprise. It is a foregone conclusion. The engineered victory of a military party—in this case the USDP—has one goal: to sustain the military dictatorship in a civilian costume.

This is the junta’s fundamental calculation: If it cannot defeat the pro-democracy movement at the ballot box, it will defeat it before ballots are even printed—by banning the most popular party, criminalizing its networks, jailing its leaders and silencing its supporters.

• Across Myanmar, indifference — and unspoken defiance — to a sham election — Nora Pyae, Myanmar Now

Few who spoke to Myanmar Now seemed to care whether their vote was counted, since the outcome is a foregone conclusion: a continuation of military rule, in one form or another. Unlike in previous elections, many say they haven’t bothered to see if their names appear on the voter lists.

“In the past, if my name was wrong on the list, I would go and correct it. Now, it really doesn’t matter to me whether it is correct or not,” said a woman from Yangon’s Dawbon Township.

She added, however, that simply ignoring the election may not be an option, amid widespread fears that the military regime could use violence and intimidation against those who refuse to vote.

“If we can avoid it, we won’t vote. If we can get away with it, we’ll just let it pass. But if the authorities start pressuring us, then we’ll have no choice. We can’t travel abroad like others, so we’ll just have to deal with the situation here,” she said.

• ‘We will vote but not with our hearts’: Inside the election staged by Myanmar’s military rulers — Jonathan Head, BBC

When the BBC tried asking people at the rally in Mandalay what they thought of the election, we were told not to by party officials. They might say the wrong thing, one man explained – they don’t know how to speak to journalists.

The number of plain-clothes military intelligence officers present there helps explain their nervousness. In a dictatorship which has criminalised liking Facebook pages criticising the election, or using the word revolution, even these staunchly pro-military party activists feared the consequences of allowing a foreign journalist the chance to ask uncensored questions.

• In Myanmar’s Election, ‘Voting Out of Fear, Not Hope’ — Sui-Lee Wee, New York Times

As voters went to the polls on Sunday for the first round of a heavily stage-managed election in Myanmar, the outcome was all but assured. The military junta that has ruled the country since seizing power in 2021 was almost certain to maintain its iron grip on power.

Some still hoped there was room for change.

“We have to do something,” said Nant Khin Aye Oo, the chairwoman of the Kayin People’s Party, one of the few parties that was not barred from fielding candidates. “We can’t live under this anymore.”