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THE scale of the defeat of Myanmar’s Union Solidarity and Development Party became clear yesterday, with the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) expecting to win three-quarters of the contested seats.
European election observers said that the vote was largely “very good,” with turnout at 80 per cent.
However, with a quarter of seats reserved for the military, the generals — who took power in a 1962 coup and nominally stepped back in 2011 — still loom large in the country’s politics.
Commentators have raised questions about how they will react. After the NLD won elections in 1990, the first since the coup, the military refused to recognise the results.
And it is not clear how the NLD will treat the country’s persecuted ethnic minorities. Buddhist extremists have repeatedly attacked Muslims.
There were no Muslim candidates in the elections, with the NLD accused of “purging” them beforehand, and 1.3 million Rohingya Muslims were not allowed to vote.
