Naypyidaw: Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi returned to parliament today along with dozens of rivals freshly hammered by her pro-democracy party’s landslide election victory as the legislature begins overseeing the country’s delicate transition.
Suu Kyi is constitutionally barred from top political office but has vowed to rule “above” the next president, who she will select following her National League for Democracy’s formidable win in the November 8 polls. The NLD bulldozed the current army-backed ruling party in polls set to dramatically reshape the country’s political landscape. But it will be the lawmakers from the military proxy Union Solidarity and Development Party — still smarting from their election drubbing — who will continue to dominate parliament as the pre-election legislature returns for a final session that will last until at least the end of January.
Suu Kyi was mobbed by dozens of journalists as she arrived at the parliament on Monday, but declined to make any comment as she takes a low profile approach to victory. She is banned from becoming president by the junta-era constitution because she married and had children with a foreigner. The Nobel laureate has nevertheless pledged to rule an NLD government through a puppet president, without revealing a candidate or setting out how the arrangement would work. Suu Kyi has the power to select a president because of her party’s parliamentary majority, with the candidate chosen in a vote of the new NLD-dominated legislature in February.
Observers predict a fevered period of political horsetrading, centred on the uncertainty over the presidency as the country creeps out of the shadow of the military. NLD spokesman Win Htein told AFP that the party was acutely conscious that the size of its victory mirrors its success in 1990 elections, which were ignored by the then ruling generals who clung to power for another two decades. “This time, although we are quite glad that we won, we worry that history may repeat itself. We don’t think the transition will be 100 percent perfect,” he told AFP.
