Despite its landslide victory, the NLD will have to share power with the military because the constitution reserves 25 percent, or 166 of the 664 seats in the two houses of parliament, for military appointees.
Thein Sein’s military-backed USDP won a 2010 election in which the NLD refused to participate, protesting that it was held under unfair conditions. After several changes in the election law, the NLD contested several dozen by-elections in 2012, winning virtually all of them.
Suu Kyi’s party handsomely won the previous general election in 1990, but the results were annulled by the military and many of the party’s leading members were harassed and jailed.
Suu Kyi had been placed under house arrest prior to that election and spent 15 of the next 22 years mostly confined to her lakeside villa in Yangon. She was under house arrest when she won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize.
Establishing democracy is only one hurdle the country faces. The new government will also have to contend with ethnic rebellions in several parts of the country. Thein Sein’s government signed a peace pact with more than a dozen smaller ethnic armies before the elections, but major groups have stayed away and fighting continues in many states. Most are fighting for autonomy and rights over their resource-rich land.
“I hope this will be a good opportunity for us to speak out for the ethnic people and demand indigenous rights,” said Lama Naw Aung, a lower house member from the Kachin State Democracy Party, representing the Kachin minority who are fighting the army in the north.
“I think there will be a change because Aung San Suu Kyi might want to finish the work for the ethnics that her father didn’t get a chance to do,” he said, referring to independence hero Aung San, who united various national groups. He and six colleagues were assassinated in July 1947, six months before Burma’s independence.
