MYANMAR opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) said last night that it had won virtually every parliamentary seat in the four states for which results were known.

The party stressed that it had won 44 of the 45 lower house seats and all 12 of the upper house seats from Yangon in Sunday’s general election.

It also won all 38 seats in Ayeyarwaddy state, all but one of the 40 in Bago and 11 out of 19 lower house seats and all 10 upper house seats in Mon state.

The trend is expected to continue in the remaining 10 states.

As the results were announced at the party’s headquarters in its traditional stronghold of Yangon, Myanmar’s former capital, massive cheering broke out among the crowd of red-shirted NLD supporters.

The Yangon result was not announced by the government’s Union Election Commission, but NLD has stationed representatives at counting centres and is keeping tallies that are relayed to its headquarters.

The election commission has been slow to release the results.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ms Suu Kyi urged supporters not to provoke losing rivals who represent in the main the former junta that ruled the country for half a century.

Hours before the Yangon announcement, party spokesman Win Htein said that NLD had won about 70 per cent of the votes counted by midday. Fellow spokesman Nyan Win put the number at 90 per cent.

“We will win a landslide,” Nyan Win declared.

If a landslide is confirmed by official results, NLD would not only dominate parliament but could also secure the presidency despite handicaps built into the constitution.

A two-thirds majority would give it control over the executive posts under Myanmar’s complicated parliamentary-presidency system, which also reserves 25 per cent of the legislature’s 664 seats for the military.

The military and the largest parties in the upper house and the lower house will each nominate one candidate for the presidential election, which will be held after January 31.

Then all 664 legislators will vote and the person with the highest number of ballots will become president, while the other two will become vice-presidents.