From Himal Southasian
Ground reporting of the 2025-26 election reveals that voters only hope for a slight lifting of the military’s boot in a race with virtually no political opposition
We found the neighbourhood sleeping under pale streetlamps and a half moon. A lone old man shuffled past on a 5am errand and pointed the way to the school, where voting was soon to begin.
Inside the dark compound, my Burmese colleague and I found a brightly lit classroom where polling staff were arranging tables, cardboard booths and electronic voting machines. They were mostly female teachers, joined by other junior government staff. When dawn came, so did two soldiers and an armed policeman, taking chairs 50 metres away.
The polling staff made nervous jokes as they primed the voting machines, whose heft and chunky buttons recalled a long-dead gadget from the 1970s. They then fastened seals on adjoining plastic boxes, where printed ballot receipts were to tumble unseen, and prepared pots of indelible ink to mark the fingers of voters.
The machines were new, and had been introduced with little transparency, but the seals and inkpots recalled similar safeguarding rituals from previous votes in 2015 and 2020. These elections were democratic milestones for Myanmar, resulting in landslide wins for the National League for Democracy (NLD) led by the dissident icon Aung San Suu Kyi. But here the rituals were in service of something entirely different. This election, which began on 28 December, with two subsequent phases of voting on 11 and 25 January, is at heart a coronation.
The country’s military junta has purged its only serious rival, the NLD, from politics after toppling its administration and jailing its leaders in a 2021 coup. Meanwhile, most of the other parties that did well in 2020 have refused to register under draconian post-coup regulations. This has left no party capable of challenging the military’s proxy, the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), beyond carving out an impotent minority in parliament.
Ben Dunant is a freelance journalist and the former editor-in-chief of the award-winning Frontier Myanmar magazine. He lived in Myanmar between 2014 and 2021, and has worked across Nepal, Kenya, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka for both media and non governmental organisations.
More content from this blog
- Putin’s Russia and Peripheral Imperialism, by Anatoly Kropivnitskyi – 20 December 2023
- Political Maturity in an Age of Binaries, by Siyâvash Shahabi – 30 October 2025
- JD Vance, the Far Right, and Ukraine – 26 July 2024
- Fascism: Neither Horseshoes Nor Fishhooks, But The Three-Way Fight, by Daphne Lawless – 5 September 2024
- People Self-Organise: Assemblies Everywhere Across Serbia, by Mašina – 20 March 2025