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31-12-2025
NAYPYIDAW: Polls have closed in Myanmar’s first general election since the country’s military toppled Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratically elected government in a 2021 coup.
The heavily restricted election took place in about a third of the Southeast Asian nation’s 330 townships, with large areas inaccessible amid a raging civil war between the military and an array of opposition forces.
In Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city, polling stations opened at 6am on Sunday (23:30 GMT, Saturday) before officially closing at 4pm (10:30 GMT).
Following the initial phase, two rounds of voting will be held on January 11 and January 25, while voting has been cancelled in 65 townships altogether.
“This means that at least 20 percent of the country is disenfranchised at this stage,” said journalist, Tony Cheng, reporting from Yangon earlier on Sunday. “The big question is going to be here in the cities, what is the turnout going to be like?”
“We are getting reports, mostly speculative at this stage, that this has been a very low turnout. We have had an off the record chat with the officials here, and they estimate that a third of the registered voters turned out to vote,” he said as the polls closed. The election has been derided by critics including the United Nations, some Western countries and human rights groups as an exercise that is not free, fair or credible, with anti-military political parties not competing.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who was deposed by the military months after her National League for Democracy (NLD) won the last general election by a landslide in 2020, remains in detention, and her party has been dissolved.
The pro-military Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) is widely expected to emerge as the largest party.
The military, which has governed Myanmar since 2021, said the vote is a chance for a new start, politically and economically, for the nation of 55 million people, with Senior General Min Aung Hlaing consistently framing the polls as a path to reconciliation.
Dressed in civilian clothes, the military chief cast his ballot shortly after polling stations opened in Naypyidaw, the country’s capital. He then held up an ink-soaked figure and smiled widely.
Voters must dip a finger into indelible ink after casting a ballot to ensure they do not vote more than once. The general told reporters afterwards that the elections were free and fair, and the vote was not tarnished because it was being held by the military.
The state-run Global New Light of Myanmar, in an opinion piece on Sunday, said the poll would open a new chapter and “serve as bridge for the people of Myanmar to reach a prosperous future”.
Earlier, it reported that election observers from Russia, China, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nicaragua and India have flown into the country ahead of the polls but with fighting still raging in many areas of the country, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Myanmar, Tom Andrews called on the international community to reject the military-run poll.
“An election organized by a junta that continues to bomb civilians, jail political leaders and criminalize all forms of dissent is not an election, it is a theatre of the absurd performed at gunpoint,” Andrews said in a statement.
“This is not a pathway out of Myanmar’s crisis. It is a ploy that will perpetuate repression, division and conflict,” he said.
The civil war, which was triggered by the 2021 coup, has killed an estimated 90,000 people, displaced 3.5 million and left some 22 million people in need of humanitarian assistance. (Int’l News Desk)
