Myanmar's President Thein Sein
has agreed to meet with Aung
San Suu Kyi as early election results point toward victory for Suu
Kyi's National League of Democracy.
The President's office didn't
spell out when such a meeting would take place, but congratulated Suu Kyi and
the NLD on their success.
"We will wait until the
... counting of the ballots eases up and try to arrange a time to meet when it
is a bit quieter," said Zaw Htay, director of the President's office.
The NLD has won 256 of the 299
seats declared so far in the country's parliament, the Pyidaungsu Hluttaw.
Suu Kyi herself won a seat in
the Kawhmu constituency in Yangon, the city formerly known as Rangoon, the
Union Election Commission said Wednesday..
And yet, the Nobel Peace
laureate -- the leader of Myanmar's long-fought democracy movement -- can't
become president.
A change in Myanmar's
constitution, drafted by the military, prevents anyone with foreign family
members from becoming the nation's leader.
Suu Kyi's late husband was
British. Her children hold British passports.
Still, she's pushing forward.
In letters published in local
media, Suu Kyi had requested a joint meeting with the commander in chief of
Myanmar's armed forces, the chairman of the parliament and Thein Sein.
She said last week she would
be "above the President" if her party won the parliamentary election.
But complicating any efforts
to change the rules in the future, the military also has an effective veto over
any proposed constitutional changes.
Already, the military-aligned
ruling party has admitted it has lost more seats than it has won. But the scale
of its losses and the NLD's victories is still emerging.
"As far as we know from
the early signal, there is a majority for NLD in the coming parliament,"
said Presidential spokesman Ye Htut.
"I, on the behalf of
President U Thein Sein, want to congratulate Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD for
their success in the election and wishing they can fulfill the desire of the
Myanmar people for the big change in the future."
The landmark election is seen
as a test of the powerful military's willingness to let the country continue
along a path toward full democracy, after decades of military-dominated rule in
Myanmar, which is also known as Burma.
The ruling party of Thein Sein
has promised the outcome of Sunday's vote will be respected, but the system is
already configured strongly in favor of the military, which gets to appoint a
quarter of all lawmakers in the two houses of parliament.
The public is electing 168 of
the 224 representatives in the upper house of the national parliament, with the
remaining quarter of the seats reserved for lawmakers appointed by the
military.
In the lower house, 325 of the
440 seats are up for grabs. Another 110 are reserved for military appointees,
while voting has reportedly been canceled in the remaining five electable lower
house seats because of security concerns.
The changes ushered in under
Thein Sein since 2011 have helped reduce the country's international isolation,
with Western sanctions being eased and foreign investment starting to ramp up.
But human rights groups have
warned more recently of a rise in politically motivated arrests as well as
discrimination directed against the Muslim minority, notably the
stateless Rohingya population.
Questions have come up over
how free and fair Sunday's election will turn out to be. Suu Kyi, the daughter
of an independence leader, expressed concern last week about irregularities in
advance voting, fraud and intimidation.
Many people still remember the
last national election her party contested, in 1990. It was widely considered
to have won that one, but the military rulers annulled the results and placed
Suu Kyi and many of her colleagues under arrest.
She spent much of the next two
decades under house arrest, becoming an internationally recognized symbol of
democracy and the country's most popular politician.
On Tuesday, she told the BBC
that she doesn't expect a repeat of 1990 this time around.
"The times are different.
The people are different," she said, describing citizens as "very
much more alert to what is going on around them."
Nonetheless, hundreds of
thousands of people in Myanmar are disenfranchised, including Rohingya Muslims
in the west of the country, who are denied citizenship, and residents of
conflict zones where the election commission canceled voting.
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