Myanmar President Thein Sein has congratulated Aung San Suu Kyi’s opposition party on its success in polls, his spokesman told the BBC.With about 47% of seats declared, the National League for Democracy (NLD) has taken over 90% of the vote. Ms Suu Kyi has written to the leadership requesting talks on national reconciliation. But spokesman U Ye Htut said such a meeting could only take place after the final results were announced.He insisted there was no attempt to delay the declaration of results from Sunday’s election. Correspondents say Ms Suu Kyi is treading carefully despite her apparent landslide victory. The NLD won elections decisively in 1990 – only for the result to be nullified and Ms Suu Kyi placed under long-term house arrest. The country still has a commander-in-chief and a strong president who are unlikely to cede control easily. This is why the results of the November 8 election, as welcome as they may seem, present a challenge unlike any other Suu Kyi has faced. Governing the country while bearing the opposition of the country’s strong military junta will be a difficult task.
This is why Suu Kyi’s first message has been to the commander-in-chief, president and speaker to meet and discuss ‘national reconciliation.’ The subtext is that Suu Kyi knows that she will have to govern with the support of the army despite having insisted last week that she would be ‘above the president’ if the NLD was able to win power. Most international observers are holding off on celebrations; months of political negotiations are now expected on how power will be shared with the country’s military elite. The NLD’s victory creates another concern. Its victory has rooted out smaller ethnic-based political parties which represented the country’s 40 percent ethnic minority populations. Given Suu Kyi’s long silence over the oppression of the Rohingya Muslims, concerns over whether the diversity of Myanmar will be represented in government are real. Recognising this, Suu Kyi had earlier spoken of the need for a government that reconciles all groups, but her stunning victory in the elections might change her stance to the worse. With polling monitors reporting a ‘well-run’ polling process, perhaps change is coming to Myanmar. But while the Myanmar establishment will have been shaken by the poll results, the commander-in-chief retains key powers including appointing the heads of the interior, defence and border security ministries. The election has been a great victory for the decades-old democracy movement in the country. It is easy to forget that Suu Kyi won her Nobel Prize in 1991. It is also easy to forget that hundreds of thousands of people in Myanmar, including the Rohingya, were denied the right to vote in this election.
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