TheEconomistNovember 7th 2020 331T
he memoryof Myanmar’s most recent
election, in 2015, still cheers Kyaw
Zayya. Even if he had not been covering the
results as a journalist, he would have gone
to the headquarters of the National League
for Democracy (nld), which swept the
polls, to celebrate the end of more than 50
years of military rule. Like so many of his
fellow citizens, he placed his hopes in
Aung San Suu Kyi, the long-persecuted
leader of the nld, who promised to bring
peace, prosperity and democracy. “We had
been suffering for decades under the mili-
tary regime, so we were eager to see
changes,” he says. “I was very delighted.”
On November 8th Myanmar will vote
again. This time Mr Kyaw Zayya will not be
taking part. He belongs to a small but grow-
ing number of Burmese who have decided
to abstain because they are bitterly disap-
pointed with the nld. He is outraged that
the commission administering the elec-
tion, which is appointed by the govern-
ment, has cancelled the vote in parts of the
country that it says are too dangerous. In
fact, not all the areas in question are
plagued by violence. And the cancellation
disproportionately affects ethnic minor-
ities, many of whom are unlikely to vote for
the nld. Some 1.5m voters have been disen-
franchised, out of a voting-age population
of roughly 35m, although the commission
has reinstated polling in a few spots.
The “no-voters” join a swelling chorus
of discontent. It includes activists and
journalists hounded by the authorities,
ethnic minorities brutalised by decades of
violent conflict and workers left behind by
rapid but uneven economic growth. Then
there are the Rohingyas, a persecuted Mus-
lim minority who have been ghettoised in
squalid refugee camps on either side of
Myanmar’s border with Bangladesh after a
series of pogroms led or cheered on by the
army. The majority of Burmese still revere
“Mother Suu” and will probably return her
to power. But neither she nor the nldhave
proved the champions of liberal ideals that
many imagined them to be. In the eyes of a
growing number of Burmese, Ms Suu Kyi,
having kindled the flame of democracy, is
now smothering it.The wild hopes borne aloft by Ms Suu
Kyi’s victory were always bound to collide
with gunmetal reality. For one thing, Ms
Suu Kyi presides over a system designed by
the generals towards the end of their half-
century in power, which preserves a big
and inviolable role for them in govern-
ment—what they call “discipline-flourish-
ing democracy”. The constitution gives
them control over their own affairs, as well
as the right to appoint the ministers of de-
fence, the interior and borders. A quarter of
the seats in the national and regional par-
liaments are reserved for members of the
Tatmadaw, as the armed forces are known.
It also controls a majority of seats on the
National Defence and Security Council,
which can declare an emergency. Ms Suu
Kyi has no control over the Tatmadaw and,
in particular, cannot force it to cease hostil-
ities against the various ethnic insurgen-
cies that have long racked the country.
Ms Suu Kyi naturally wants to release
her government from these manacles. In
March the nldput forward several consti-
tutional amendments, among them one
that would gradually reduce the number of
seats in parliament reserved for military
appointees. But the generals had foreseen
such a move. Constitutional amendments
need the support of more than three-quar-
ters of mps. With a quarter of the seats, the
Tatmadaw can block any it does not like—
and so it did.
Within these restrictions, Ms Suu Kyi
has tried to nibble away at the Tatmadaw’sElections in Myanmar
False start
Aung San Suu Kyi was supposed to set Burmese democracy free. Instead she has
clipped its wings
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