Yangon // Vote-counting was under way in Myanmar on Sunday after millions of people voted in a landmark election, with a massive turnout.
Voters had queued from before dawn in huge numbers to cast their ballots for the first time in a quarter of a century, on a day heavy with history and filled with emotion.
Early indications showed an “80 per cent” turnout, according to union election commission deputy director Thant Zin Aung – a figure Aung San Suu Kyi’s opposition party believes favours their bid for a majority.
Thousands of supporters – many decked in the party’s red colour – gathered outside the Yangon headquarters of the National League for Democracy in the hope of some indication of victory from Suu Kyi. But the woman known affectionately as “The Lady” did not appear.
More than 30 million people were eligible to vote in Myanmar’s freest election for a generation.
The NLD believes a fair vote will power it into government after a decades-long struggle against army dictatorship.
But Nobel Laureate Suu Kyi is barred from the presidency by the army-scripted constitution and the NLD faces an uphill struggle because a quarter of seats have been reserved for the military.
In the capital Naypyidaw, president Thein Sein, a one-time top-ranking junta general, smiled for the cameras and held up his little finger, stained with purple ink, after voting.
His army-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) is the main obstacle to an NLD victory.
Many voters remain nervous about how the powerful army will react if it loses, with concerns over the fraud that riddled previous elections.
But after casting his vote in the capital, Myanmar’s powerful army chief said his troops would respect the voice of the electorate.
“Just as the winner accepts the result, so should the loser,” Min Aung Hlaing said.
Ms Suu Kyi, wearing a traditional skirt with her trademark string of flowers in her hair, was mobbed by scores of reporters as she voted in Yangon early on Sunday.
Aspirations for change run high in Myanmar after five decades in which a brutal junta silenced opponents with violence and jail.
But in 2011 the regime suddenly handed power to a semi-civilian government led by former generals.
Sweeping reforms since have loosened the straitjacketed economy and brought many freedoms to an isolated, wearied people.
The head of the European Union’s election monitoring team, Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, offered cautious optimism.
“We have not seen signs of cheating” in the vote, he said, but warned risks remained during the transportation and counting of the ballots.
It is the first election the NLD has contested since 1990 – when the party claimed a landslide win only to see the army ignore the result and condemn Ms Suu Kyi to spend most of the next 20 years under house arrest.
The 70-year-old is not allowed to be president under a charter that blocks anyone with foreign children from top office – Ms Suu Kyi’s two sons are British.
But on Thursday she declared an NLD win would see her take a position “above the president”, a challenge to the army that has spent 25 years trying to hamper her political ascent.
Ms Suu Kyi has also faced international censure for failing to speak up for the country’s embattled Muslim population, especially the ethnic Rohingya in restive Rakhine state.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have been excluded from voting.
* Agence France-Presse
